For one family, $50 means not having to contemplate eating cat food. For another family, $50 means celebrating a son’s birthday. It’s a $50 thank you gift that tells its own story. There are just so many stories.
Last week, we met families at supermarkets, shopping centres, schools, parks, and going door-to-door. This week, we started listening. We’ve shared burgers, Chinese food, Indian food, pizza, and coffee with families in their living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, and backyards. We’ve gotten to know families of two, three, four, five, six and families where there are such fluid boundaries, numbers are too hard to count. We’ve climbed out of our studio, out of our meetings, out of our cars, out of our contexts.
It’s about time.
People are real. Services, systems, models, and frameworks are not.
People’s experiences never fit neatly within the box on a form, or conform to the criteria on a piece of paper. The labels and diagnoses, thresholds and cut-off points, used to determine ‘need’ and distribute ‘support’ too often shape what is said and what is heard. They tell us more about how society constructs problems than how people construct their lives.
So we try to just be present. We don’t have any targets to reach or information we must extract. We hope to learn something about what families might engage with, with the kinds of ideas that turn them off and on. That means we come with some scenario cards and a few prompt sheets, not with interview questions, assessments, or plans. And that also means we don’t come armed with information of existing programs, services, or solutions. We start with the family, not with stuff about families.
It’s hard to do. How do you shed what you think you know? I often struggle to see families as they are, rather than through the different psychological & sociological lenses I learned in school, at home, and picked up in prior projects. You can’t ignore those words and perspectives entirely, but you can get lost in the moment with families and realize there’s no need to apply anything to the experience. It just is.
On Monday, I worried whether the newest member of our team, Carolyn, would be open to experiencing without applying. I also worried that Chris and I, after working many months as a two-member team, would be too insular. I wondered whether we would be able to shift the project to reflect Carolyn’s expertise and not just ours. I knew that meant valuing—not just respecting—where Carolyn has come from: her social work training and years of successfully working with families in extreme crisis, even if I don’t always agree with the professional social work model. How could we draw on social work, while also questioning the ideas about parenting, child safety, and risk we’ve seen predetermine interactions between social workers and families?
So far, I needn’t have worried.
Just getting out there, to listen and talk, has been transformational for all of us. Here I was on Monday, blabbering away to Carolyn about some of the differences in the approach we take, and none of that would have mattered had we not each had a moment with families this week that made us pause, and just revel in the realness.
Carolyn’s shared her thoughts about her first week here on the TACSI website.
Every Friday, if we can, we’re going to write down our reflections—both as individuals and as a team. And yes, it is Sunday as I write this. I have no doubt some weeks are going to be tougher than others: finding that balance between building on what we know and un-learning what we thought we knew. Our strategy, right now, is to be really honest with each other, to name the discomfort and the worry, and then just get on with it and climb out of our studio, out of our meetings, out of our cars, and out of our contexts.
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