Frontline in Current Events

I woke up thinking about my kids at work. Yesterday, I finally got a hold of the foster care worker who has two of our participants. He has had them for months. Once I explained that we could pick them up he was on board with us continuing our program with them. We get to see them this weekend. I have been worried about them. They have two little sisters who are also in care which breaks my heart. I am not sure what the situation is with their mother but it isn’t too hard to piece together.

The participant who wanted to quit our program is back in. My coordinator is so bad for leaving out details. I did not know, that during this kid’s meltdown, he was saying that nobody would care if he was gone. That changes the narrative. We let him go without a fight. He lives with his ill grandfather who has him in a million programs. I thought he was just programmed out. The organization that funds us wanted him back in. He committed another crime. This is what our program is for. It is for kids who are in conflict with the law but are too young to be charged or for kids who are at risk of coming in contact with the law.

My coordinator and I were talking about how relieved we are that our spending is behind us. Our program is restarting. We are building it from scratch. We had two budgets so that we could get ourselves structured. Our funders want us to focus on the kids. They don’t care too much about our reports, they want our attention on the kids which has been a challenge because our organization keeps pushing us to focus on the big business side of the organization when we want to focus on the philanthropy side. There is nothing in the way now so we have been focusing on growing our program and our participants.

We start campaigning this evening. Our organization has a brazilian different programs and we are going to visit one of them today to introduce our program to their participants. This program is one that sponsors families who have missing and murdered Indigenous women. This is the program that my friend Alex used to run. She had to sit through a lot of court cases that were hard to sit through. She was there for one of the high-profile cases last year. We had a serial killer who was trying to protect his own race from ours.

We got an email from a pediatrician who wants to meet with us. They have kids that they would like to refer to our program. This is great. Another thing that is great is that we got the go-ahead to get our Elder back. The new program director told us that we had to cut ties with him. They have a list of elders that we can draw from. We advocated to get him on that list and they were open to it. That is underway. I miss him lots.

It was our white kid that I woke up thinking about. Sorry to bluntly say it like that. He is our only non-indigenous participant. He has everything. Is the vibe. He lives in a great neighborhood with two parents, and has everything that we can offer so it was just easy to assume that we didn’t need to worry about him. His whole family dissolved in December and we had no idea because he is so good at masking. His grandmother disclosed that to me in January. She didn’t explain what happened, just that something happened between him and his mother’s boyfriend that resulted in the boyfriend’s arrest. His mother lost custody of her kids, temporarily and the father of his siblings took his kids to America. It’s just him now and he is confused about the whole situation. He is being tossed around between his non-equipped grandmother and aunt. He can’t be with his mother without a social worker supervising. He has ADHD and is on the spectrum. He is a masker. My coordinator had a one-on-one with him on Tuesday and he told me that he wasn’t himself. That broke my heart. This kid never fails to mask. I will have time with him next week. I’m the one he is comfortable opening up to. Our program is the only thing his family doesn’t have to fight to get him to go to. He likes us. The first time I met him, his mother had to fight to get him to leave with us. Now we are his comfort zone.

The workplace politics is still confusing. My coordinator mentioned that he feels like he is the one who has stepped up and been in communication with the new management. 99.9% of his emails I prompted him to do. Most of what he does I prompt him to do. I am a puppeteer. It creeped me out for a second that I have him wrapped around my little finger. Most of this program has been me pulling it together and keeping it together. This is okay, we complement each other. I have to nag and boss him around a lot and the pressure I put on him caused a nervous breakdown a few weeks ago. He wants to grow into his role and I have all the experience so I have taken him under my wing. We are open about this to each other. My probation is up this weekend and he is going to try and get me a raise. My influence on him is very strong, and that epiphany yesterday creeped me out. After his nervous breakdown, I gave him the end all be all of pep talks. He is now going to the gym, he saw a family doctor for the first time in his adult life and learned that he has high blood pressure so he is now cleaning up his diet. He is also working on quitting vaping. I am mentoring him.

It’s 5 AM now. I got my sleep schedule back on track. I’m going to hit up the gym after this entry. I banked extra hours yesterday so that I can leave the office today and do a community walk. It’s been over two months since I have been able to do that. I can’t do it on company time. I want it to be a regular thing, volunteering at a shelter and joining them when they walk around downtown to feed the houseless. In case we were wondering why I say houseless, it is because my people don’t have a word for homeless. There was no concept for it. The land is our home and we were nomadic.

On with my day then.