This video was produced by YouthREX.

HERE’S HOW THE CREATORS DESCRIBE THIS VIDEO:

On May 7, 2026, YouthREX commemorated #YouthREXat10 with an online event featuring special guest Dr. Bianca Baldridge. The event continued YouthREX’s 10-year tradition of co-creating spaces for the Ontario youth sector to learn and reflect together on the possibilities and limitations of youth work.

As part of the event, YouthREX hosted a community dialogue and Q&A with Bianca that brought together participants, including youth workers, community leaders, and educators, for a conversation about transformative youth work practices. Participants shared stories, questions, and insights about the conditions shaping young people’s lives and the critical role youth workers play in creating opportunities for care, healing, growth, and thriving. In this conversation, Bianca responds to some of the most important and pressing questions that emerged from the dialogue.

Building on themes from Bianca’s keynote presentation, Precarity and Promise: Youth Work as the Process of Futuring, the discussion explored the realities, challenges, and possibilities of youth work within complex structural contexts.

Bianca is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and founder of the Critical Youth Work Collective, a research lab committed to humanizing research, critical youth work pedagogies, and honouring youth work professionals.

Plus, don’t miss:

• Bianca’s keynote, Precarity and Promise: Youth Work as the Process of Futuring, underscoring the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of youth workers, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth.

• An Opus to Youth Workers, the performance of a specially commissioned spoken-word poem by Eddie Lartey, award-winning poet, creative, and author. In this spoken word poetry, Eddie draws on metaphors and imagery about music to paint a picture of what youth workers do and what their work is really like.