“The call we have just heard is rather addressed to all of humanity. But in this place, in this moment, humanity is us, whether we like it or not. Let’s take advantage of it, before it’s too late. Let us represent with dignity for once the brood into which misfortune has thrust us. –Samuel Beckett1
Posted yesterday at 10:00 a.m.
The alarm sounded a few decades ago continues to sound although solutions exist to prevent homelessness, to counter the distress of young people who leave youth centers without a safety net, who find themselves on the street, or who experience significant difficulties in their family environment or during their development at a given point. Young people for whom the passage through adolescence is too often punctuated by random risk-taking that jeopardizes the transition to adulthood.
I have worked for more than 20 years in a so-called local team to welcome, listen, support, care for and stimulate the skills of young people in very precarious situations, homeless or at risk of homelessness.2so that they can find a dream and not despair of having a place in our society3. If I was able to be useful, like my fellow speakers, it is because I first accepted to question my preconceptions and not to know everything for them. It is also that I agreed to meet their parents, relatives, friends and any other significant person in their journey. Accepted to learn from the lived experience of these young people confronted with multiple adaptation challenges and a large proportion of whom have learned to survive the trials in a creative and often paradoxical way (e.g. organizing themselves so as not to feel fatigue or hunger, it’s very adaptive when you don’t know when you can eat or fall asleep in a safe place, but it can lead, in the short or medium term, to developing several health and legal problems) .
With my colleagues, I learned and relearned many things from them. I relearned that a face, whatever it is, is always a landscape or a country4 to rediscover and illuminate, revealing underestimated or misunderstood skills, unsuspected creativity, inspiring courage.
I reinforced my conviction about the need for an interdisciplinary, holistic and inclusive approach that recognizes these young people, as well as any significant person in their journey, as full partners in the reflection and the search for urgent and lasting solutions in responding to their complex needs: we find how when we recognize their agency and allow ourselves to seek with them.
I have learned that a vertical (or hierarchical) classification of expertise (scientific, institutional, community, clinical, individual) often compartmentalizes knowledge into categories that are too tight, which favor thinking in silos, do not serve the circulation of exchanges or the distribution of the power of speech. I have experienced that it is quite different with a horizontal type of work community, more flexible and democratic, which does not value one knowledge at the expense of another while allowing easier orchestration of speaking out. between the intelligences and sensitivities brought together.
Recognition of the expertise of the parties directly concerned is not a whim or a transitory fashion. Many clinical experiences carried out in the field as well as research reflect the wishes expressed by the young people themselves and their families.5.
By accepting to do otherwise, our collective creativity is stimulated by ideas that we had not thought of at the start. Among the principles of action identified, we know that we must reach out to people, be close to the places where these young people live and make ourselves available, show empathy, curiosity and humility, weave a link and create alliances with their loved ones and the wider community, promote an approach adapted to their values, needs and objectives, stimulate their interests by giving them access to education, work and culture: artistic, sports and outdoors, music, theatre, dance, writing, workshops, among others6.
You do not emerge unscathed from encounters with young survivors of extreme adversity: the urgency to act against despair never leaves you. An ethic of solidarity and cooperation required by crisis intervention is part of your daily life. Preventing homelessness is an emergency closely linked to other recurring topical themes that require just as much innovative and systemic interventions (mental health, suicide, bullying, poverty, judicialization, crime, climate emergency). An emergency which contributes to our own survival and our human dignity and which requires a change of direction in our ways of intervening and thinking, whether we like it or not.
1 Beckett, S. (1952). Waiting for Godot. Paris: Midnight Editions.
2 Other concepts are often diluted in the term homelessness: wandering (emotional, identity), social exclusion, self-exclusion (self-rejection), self-abandonment, marginalization (desired, suffered or chosen by default).
3 See Manon Barbeau’s film (1999): The Shadow Army
4 Reference to quotes from Colette and Gilles Vigneault.
5 ACCESS Esprits Ouvertes/Open Minds; CREVAJ; GRIJA; among others around the world.
6 Aubin, D. (2008). Young people in difficulty – an invitation to creativity. Psychology Quebec, 25 (2), 24-27.