This video was produced by YouthREX.

HERE’S HOW THE CREATORS DESCRIBE THIS VIDEO:

To commemorate #YouthREXat10, we hosted an online event that 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.

Our special guest was Dr. Bianca Baldridge, 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.

Bianca’s presentation, Precarity and Promise: Youth Work as the Process of Futuring, drew from her new book, Laboring in the Shadows: Precarity and Promise in Black Youth Work, to underscore the significance, fragility, precarity, and power of youth workers, their essential work, and the possibilities they create for youth. She highlighted the structural challenges in youth work and the nonprofit sector that shape youth workers’ personal and professional lives. Despite these challenges, youth workers continue to cultivate experiences and opportunities for young people to thrive.

Considering the complexity and precarity of the youth work landscape, including the pressure the field is under to address societal and educational problems and the quick decisions youth workers are forced to make daily, the conversation explored under what conditions the process of conscious futuring and dreaming can occur. Bianca’s presentation also reclaimed the space needed to contemplate the viability and sustainability of youth work as a process of futuring.

Plus, don’t miss:

• The community dialogue with Bianca to explore transformative youth work practices that are attentive to the structural contexts that shape young people’s lives.

• 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.