Child Poverty: Why Youth Must Lead

Teach every child to raise his voice
And then, my brothers, then
Will justice be demanded
By ten million righteous men.
Make them hear you.
When they hear you,
I'll be near you
Again.

 

 

Two headlines from today.  If you commit just a bit of sociology, you might even sense a connection between them:

 

“If ever there was a wakeup call, this would be it,” the mayor-elect says of a report showing city has highest child-poverty rate among Canadian cities.

 

Crippling child poverty.  That's a whole generation growing up in tense climates, without proper nutrition, without proper supports.  But clearly, this is someone else's problem, right?  Those parents should be doing more, working harder, hustling for cash, or something.  It's their own fault, right?  Nothing to do with us.

 

So long as governments keep taxes low and especially provide tax breaks to businesses, that'll create jobs - then people just need to hustle to get them and everything else will be fine.

 

On to story number two:

 

Some 73 students were suspended or expelled for bringing weapons to school over the past school year, up from 42 the previous year.

 

Guns.  In our schools.  What's behind this?  Are backwoods bigots from Pakistan invading our schools and using their mind control powers to make our kids bring weapons to class instead of pens? Is this a reflection of the erosion of Canadian values, or the Americanization of our culture?

 

Here's an idea:

 

Chris Penrose, executive director of Success Beyond Limits, a youth outreach program in the Jane St. and Finch Ave. area, said he is concerned about violence among teens. But he said the weapons spike likely has to do with larger community issues, including poverty, education gaps and youth unemployment.

 

There is plenty of money in Canada right now; there are 118,000 millionaires in Toronto alone.  There are plenty of services - public, not-for-profit, corporate social responsibility - that exist, offering an alphabet soup of services.

 

And of course, there's the prevailing wisdom of our laissez-faire model of capitalism; in Canada, it doesn't matter where you come from, what hurdles are in your way, if you push hard enough you too can be one of the 118,000.  You gotta work hard, be willing to start simple, but above all you gotta hustle.

 

The implication, of course, is that if you don't succeed, it's your own damned fault.

 

Here's a term that will be familiar to pretty much anyone in town with responsibility for managing finances - ROI, Return On Investment.  If you can't see a clear, short-term return on whatever your investment might be, you don't do it.  Low-hanging fruit are therefore preferable; the least effort required for decent gains in short time frames.

 

Let's reframe that a little bit so that we're all on the same page:

 

- If you don't have resources - if you're poor, young, accessibility-challenged, whatever, the pressure is on for you to hustle hard over the long-run if you want to get anywhere in life.

 

- on the other hand, if you've had some success in life, long-term investments aren't worth your time; it's all about the quick-wins, the best bang for your buck, the low-hanging fruit.

 

For the haves, it all makes perfect sense - you spend half your life working really hard to gain success, but when you're there, you put the pressure on everyone else and focus on quick wins.

 

Now, picture you're a child who lives in a marginalized neighbourhood.  Maybe your parents were born somewhere else; maybe they grew up marginalized themselves, but in either case, they've invested time and energy - time away from their kids - and have nothing to show for it.  If anything, the amount of energy they've put into trying to get ahead and the frustration they've faced in not succeeding has bled into home life, which isn't great.

 

This is the lesson a youth can easily take away from this - the people with resources will tell you to hustle, but the truth is it won't get you anywhere.  In fact, this whole "you gotta come to me" approach to success is pretty much an excuse for those with power to stick to their low-hanging fruit and not share their millions.

 

What happens when you feel the people who are supposed to be the movers and shakers in town are making excuses to exclude you and our peers?  How much effort are you willing to put into getting an education, working crap jobs if you can find them, if you are never going to get where they are because society's designed to keep you marginalized?

 

Leadership is solving problems.  The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.  They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.

 

This is worth pausing on. 

 

Our society is anti-leadership, from the top down.  We have governments cutting programs, cutting taxes and cutting cheques on things like child care and mental health supports for veterans rather than making long-term investments.  We have bosses that are increasingly pressuring employees to be functionaries, content-producers, client-managers and business developers, yet training is not being provided and salaries aren't matching up. 

 

Even in our education system, teachers are being told it's their job to be educator, mediator, psychologist and content-creator to massive classrooms that include children with learning challenges.  Parents are being told to do more, but do they have the resources, time, or cognitive/emotional bandwidth?  Are they too absorbed with work, or too depressed and frustrated from a lack of work to give their kids what they need?

 

We can look to previous generations and say "they did it, so quit making excuses" - but without asking if it was a good process for them, or how the changing nature of work (who really has a 9 to 5 job anymore?), the rise of mobile comms devices and the soul-sucking challenges of gridlock play a role.

 

There is next to no leadership out there right now.  The people with power and responsibility don't want to be leaders - they don't care about their people's problems.  Sometimes they don't even care about their organizational programs, because they plan to be gone before they blow up (low-hanging fruit, remember)?

 

Or, they don't feel empowered themselves.  This can be justified in many ways (blame being a common one) but the basic fact is that they aren't, in their current condition, up to the challenge of leadership.

 

Some of them actually believe throwing the kids in the deep end is a good strategy, because that's how you identify the strong swimmers.  What happens to everyone else is one of those "not my problem" things.

 

Yet we desperately need leadership right now. 

 

We're hearing the same things from every echelon of society; government is broken.  Infrastructure is screwed.  Organizations are a mess.  Yet those within those institutions will step up to the mic and tell us "everything's fine, we have a bold plan, just trust us and don't mind the man behind the curtain."

 

Back-of-napkin plans are being sold for their commercial value, not because they make sound structural sense.  Marginalized voices are being drowned out with top-down messaging.  Rabble rousers are being silenced through defunding, firing or even eviction.

 

Is it any wonder that youth are taking their cues from the world around them and realizing that if they want to be safe, if they want to have power, they have to be willing to take it through whatever means are available?

 

A kid not investing in schoolwork, being a bully and carrying a weapon aren't defying social rules of engagement - they're picking up on the socio-cultural cues around them responding in kind.

 

This is it; this is where laissez-faire capitalism meets behavioural economics.  In a game of competitive escalation and a reduction in personal investment, it's who's got the biggest stick who wins power and privilege.

 

And as of right now, there is no way, no one who can do anything to stop this trend. 

 

Why?  It's the culture, stupid. 

 

We have a silo-based culture, full stop.  Even those who talk about disrupting silos are really just trying to stuff more stuff into their silos.  Funding is there, but getting it is so competitive that an increasing amount of investment is going into competition, not solutions.  Lost opportunities, duplication, gaps and overlaps are resulting.  There are communities in this city that are glutted with programs and players, and yet the structural issues remain.  Why aren't we learning from this?

 

I question whether the people leading the charge right now are prepared to wrap their heads around the enormity of the challenge.  Even if they do care, the reality they grew up in and are living now is fundamentally different than the one being faced by marginalized youth today.

 

The best champions of any problem are those with lived experience.

 

Which comes to the crux of the matter, the core component of culture change, the disruption that is most difficult but most necessary.

 

The way forward isn't for more downtown adults to impose solutions on youth; if those youth aren't themselves leading the way forward, whatever gets built isn't going to work.

 

This requires a fundamental shift in the way we look at society, at ourselves, and at the role of power.

 

We always look for the best-in-show to invest in; they're most likely to provide the best ROI.  We then take them from wherever they are and put them in environments considered to be good for growth.

 

All of this is backwards.

 

We have to start focusing on those least likely to succeed with minimal effort and put them in the driver's seat.  That means going to their communities, learning to speak their language, taking them serious and treating them seriously.

 

We have to create the best environments where these youth are - in other words, don't bring youth to MaRS, bring MaRS to the youth.  That means more investment of time and interest - which, but its nature, requires motivation to want to make things better, not for a quick ROI, but because it needs done.

 

Which comes to the last, most challenging, most fundamentally important component of our needed culture change.  Right now, we see power as a form of wealth to be accumulated; power is something we want because, when we have it, we can get more through giving less.

 

That stops right now.

 

From this point forward, power isn't something to be obtained; it's blood to be circulated.  The same goes for money.

 

Here is John Tory's challenge - he needs to be the anti-Doug Ford.  He needs to step away from the practices that have brought him success in life, because it's not about him right now.

 

After years of seeking high office of some kind, of being the guy at the top, now is the moment for John Tory to show true leadership by stepping back and becoming a conduit rather than a capstone.

 

The same holds true for every person of influence in this city; councilors, Executive Directors, CEOs and talking heads.  We need to be empowering leaders, not giving orders.  We have to be cultivating solutions from the grassroots rather than imposing infrastructure on top of.

 

This is not a lofty vision, nice words on a page.  It's a fundamental necessity. 

 

Our society is crumbling and the solutions we're coming up with aren't good enough.  We are failing the next generation, and they know it.

 

If we aren't prepared to empower youth to lead, there will come a day not too far from now when they will simply take what they want by force.  That is, after all, the lesson we're teaching them.

 

The choice is ours.  The consequences will be ours.

 

Either way, it will be youth that lead.

It Gets Darker Before the Dawn

 

"It shows the seriousness of what is happening around the world, and how important it is for officers to be equipped with the best information, with a focus on their safety," he said.

 

The best information. 

 

What would that be, exactly?  It doesn't refer to an understanding of behavioural economics and a thorough analysis of the causal conditions that lead to criminal behavior - that's too much like committing sociology.

It probably has nothing to do with geopolitics, especially the local equity imbalances that ISIS recruiters, like any gang, tap into to gain converts.

 

No, one imagine that the information provided will be of more the carding variety - suspicion by association.

 

Then there's the whole "focus on their safety" piece, which is most troubling.  "To serve and protect" puts the people's interest first, not the safety of officers.  It's inherently a risky job, but by getting in early, engaging with a community and working on initiatives like mentorship programs, active police help reduce crime in the first place.

 

A focus on safety tends to involve less interaction and when it comes, it comes with greater armament so as to reduce officer risk. 

 

Ferguson is a great example of how this plays out in practice; well-armed police with their usual suspects list caused and escalated a tragic situation one expect to hear about from the streets of Syria, not suburban USA.

 

Or think the G20 - police had information about black block plans to escalate street violence and fed right into that beast, creating a public relations nightmare and increasing tensions among citizens and the police, already high and already growing higher.

 

"I don't talk to cops," a youth told me on the streetcar the other day.  This after I interceded when hearing her say "I hate all cops," dehumanizing them in the same manner as which carding dehumanizes certain ethnic groups.  Tell us more about the youth who are choosing to join with ISIL, government: are they ethnic minorities who feel marginalized in their Canadian context, singled out by police, ignored by employers, looked at with suspicion on the subway?

 

There are a lot of good officers out there.  I hear from them, sometimes, about the struggle they have within the current police culture that focuses on strength, wins, and threats more than it does public service.  I hear the exact same thing from youth entering that culture, which is alarming.

 

In recent days, more than 100,000 Syrian refugees have fled to Turkey in a bid to escape ISIS.

Why?  Because the folk of ISIS are brutal alphas with a superiority complex.  The God they worship is not the one of Islam; if anything, they have fallen for the false god prophesied by Islamic eschatology.

 

The thuggish converts to ISIS rape, pillage, torture, abuse power and focus on destroying others in defense of "their cause" which is a create a state in which they have absolute unquestioned authority and the respect of the international community because they're such bad asses.

 

Suspicion, fear, threat of arms, abuse - those aren't the tools of enlightenment.  They are, however, increasingly the hammer of choice for security.

 

As they say, it's darkest before the dawn - but the dawn is a long way off.  It's going to get a lot, lot darker - which why now, more than ever, we need to keep the candle of enlightenment burning.

 

 

Social Entrepreneurs or Change Catalysts?

Not only is social enterprise incapable of being a cure-all, it may also create more problems than it solves when not properly understood or implemented.  These consequences highlight the need for a more balanced and focused approach.  Perhaps the first step towards getting social enterprise back on track is to admit it cannot be the panacea for all the world's social problems. 

I think Mitchell Kutney is missing something.

He's bang on with most of his commentary, though.  All sorts of players have latched on to the notion of social enterprise: to put a fresh coat of paint on outdated brands, justify a reduction in charitable investments (there's people who do that for money now) and where government is concerned as justification to reduce crippling levels of social service spending.

Then again, it's becoming increasingly clear that there is a lot of duplication, gaps and overlaps within existing NFPs and fewer metrics to prove what is and isn't working than you'd think.  We're not moving forward, we're treading water.  Government, meanwhile, is looking down the road at fiscal deficits, infrastructure deficits and a rising tide of health and social service costs and realizing it is in no way up to the challenges that lay before us.

The system we have now isn't working.  Continuing to do things the same way is not a viable option.

So what do we do now? 

It's all very daunting.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, the recognition of this reality is partly behind the growth of the Open Government movement.  Stated or not, the theory is that if you create more opportunity for common folk to get engaged and have their say - broaden the conversation, if you will - there will be new ideas, yes, but more people on the hook when things go wrong.

The people in charge, however, either feel confident or realize they need to look confident so as not rattle investors/voters; after all that's in no small part how they got to be leaders.  These folk aren't going to come out and say "I have no idea what to do next" even if they realize that's the case - and far too many of them don't.  They figure what worked before will work again, we just need to return to a romanticized, simpler past.

The concept of social enterprise as it's understood now might have led to a moving of the accountability deck chairs, but the problem is fundamentally the same as it was prior to 2008 - our societal model is completely inadequate to manage today's realities in sustainable fashion.  

We live on a burning platform; some of us are even adding fuel to the flames.

If we can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them, what do we do now?

Enter the people I think of when my minds turn towards social entrepreneurship.  

These folk are more than just the why - there are lots of people in various fields who actually do care about the public good in one aspect or another.  Money's not a motivator for them, but a necessity to be managed, like food or sleep.

What gets these people up in the morning is the burning desire to fix the structural problems they see in the world.  It drives them nuts seeing should-be leaders constantly driving society into the ditch, not planning ahead and not employing practices like behavioural economics or design thinking to make the system work better.  These entrepreneurs aren't disillusioned with today's institutions so much as they're disappointed more people aren't proactively trying to reconfigure them.

The folk I have in mind are literally frightening in their cognitive capacity; they're the trained athletes at a charity run, processing information and aligning different fields and churning out meta-solutions at a super-human rate.  To talk with them is exhausting; they think in maps, not symbols - they're outside The Cave.

They are this generations Polymaths or Renaissance Men (and women) - call them Multi-Disciplinary Specialists, because they are experts in several fields all at once.  Increasingly, they're realizing that today's leaders simply aren't up to the structural challenges we face; as such, they're organizing to tackle the solutions themselves.  

According to the accepted definition, these people are social entrepreneurs, though the ones I know don't really care about the label.  Sorting out who should be responsible for fixing the system is a waste of time; they're just going to do it.

As is the case with any organism, external challenges don't spark adaptation - they cull those who don't fit an evolving world.  

It takes something else to catalyze change.

We have to stop looking for some kind of external cure-all, a panacea; it doesn't exist.  We also need to take a fresh look at the lateral thinkers, the social disrupters in our midst.  To paraphrase one change agent - we keep trying to cure them, but perhaps they are the cure.