Final Thoughts on Project Gracehaven
I think up until this point, I have highly generalised the learning I gained from Project Gracehaven. However, I do contend that there are many personal lessons that I have learnt during my time with the residents there. To reiterate, working with Gracehaven was a highly bittersweet experience for me. If given the chance to work in a similar capacity but with a more cooperative organisation as a caveat, I would love to work with youths-at-risk again.
The first lesson I learnt is that we should not treat these youths as outliers; that they are different from us. Committing 'othering' is a fallacy that most people who work with these youths-at-risk commit. They are not different from us in any way. Yes, they live in a residential home and yes they have their reasons for being there, but they are human, the same as you and me. I think my group mates, and myself included, committed this fallacy during the first session of the workshop. We had our biases, we had our own generalisations of what these youths were going to be like and it did definitely affect how we talked to them at first. It affected our rapport with these youths because we were talking to them from top-down and I could sense their frustration because we failed to realise that these youths were being treated as 'problems' rather than 'chances of rehabilitation', every hour, every minute that they were in Gracehaven. As soon as we started to treat them as everyday individuals, we could see them being more comfortable with us.
The second lesson I learnt is how big of an impact we can make to these youths' lives. Vid shared with us something that rocked me to my core and that was when we had written letters for these youths upon the end of the workshop. We originally planned to have the group member that was attached to the resident to write a note for them since they knew them the best but when we did that, the residents wanted all of us to write inside instead. When probed further, one of the residents said "... we want to know how you all see us.". That was profound and did change my perspective on the whole workshop. Yes, this workshop was about emotion management, and yes, this was what Gracehaven had wanted us to leave them with; strategies to cope with their emotions. However, the residual effects of that workshop were evident, we were not just mere volunteers to these residents but we did have a personal affective dimension with them as well. To them, it was important to know how we viewed them because every other social network has either shunned them or treated them as children. Workshops are a way for these residents to feel like they were human again and it was great that I was a part of that experience.
The last lesson that is by far my most personal is the fact that I am just like them in many ways. I have struggled with my own ways of managing my anger; I fought a lot when I was in primary school, got sent to the principal's office dozens of times during my time in secondary school and as embarrassing as it is, I have threatened my parents with physical violence at one point of my life. I was fortunate because my parents never did call up the authorities and categorise me as Beyond Parental Control (BPC). However, at the same time, I WAS one phone call away from being just like them. I was fortunate to eventually meet friends that cared for me, had enough financially to go for counselling sessions when I was younger and had authoritative figures that never gave up on me. I was the lucky one but when I was tasked with conducting an emotion management workshop I did feel like I was an imposter. The residents placed us on a pedestal; that somehow we were of higher social value than them but that could not be farther from the truth when it comes to me personally. In another life, one mistake could have made me a participant of such a workshop rather than a facilitator.
Gracehaven was definitely an experience for me and it did not just open my eyes to the issues at these youths-at-risk face but also definitely an avenue for me to conduct a lot of reflexivity. The learning I gained from Project Gracehaven is something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, not just at the life stage of being an adult but also in future milestones of being a father myself (hopefully!). Life works in weird ways and I never thought I would be in a module where I could actually carry out a project in direct contact with the subjects I study with constantly in lecture notes and readings but at the same time, I would not trade this experience for anything else.
The first lesson I learnt is that we should not treat these youths as outliers; that they are different from us. Committing 'othering' is a fallacy that most people who work with these youths-at-risk commit. They are not different from us in any way. Yes, they live in a residential home and yes they have their reasons for being there, but they are human, the same as you and me. I think my group mates, and myself included, committed this fallacy during the first session of the workshop. We had our biases, we had our own generalisations of what these youths were going to be like and it did definitely affect how we talked to them at first. It affected our rapport with these youths because we were talking to them from top-down and I could sense their frustration because we failed to realise that these youths were being treated as 'problems' rather than 'chances of rehabilitation', every hour, every minute that they were in Gracehaven. As soon as we started to treat them as everyday individuals, we could see them being more comfortable with us.
The second lesson I learnt is how big of an impact we can make to these youths' lives. Vid shared with us something that rocked me to my core and that was when we had written letters for these youths upon the end of the workshop. We originally planned to have the group member that was attached to the resident to write a note for them since they knew them the best but when we did that, the residents wanted all of us to write inside instead. When probed further, one of the residents said "... we want to know how you all see us.". That was profound and did change my perspective on the whole workshop. Yes, this workshop was about emotion management, and yes, this was what Gracehaven had wanted us to leave them with; strategies to cope with their emotions. However, the residual effects of that workshop were evident, we were not just mere volunteers to these residents but we did have a personal affective dimension with them as well. To them, it was important to know how we viewed them because every other social network has either shunned them or treated them as children. Workshops are a way for these residents to feel like they were human again and it was great that I was a part of that experience.
The last lesson that is by far my most personal is the fact that I am just like them in many ways. I have struggled with my own ways of managing my anger; I fought a lot when I was in primary school, got sent to the principal's office dozens of times during my time in secondary school and as embarrassing as it is, I have threatened my parents with physical violence at one point of my life. I was fortunate because my parents never did call up the authorities and categorise me as Beyond Parental Control (BPC). However, at the same time, I WAS one phone call away from being just like them. I was fortunate to eventually meet friends that cared for me, had enough financially to go for counselling sessions when I was younger and had authoritative figures that never gave up on me. I was the lucky one but when I was tasked with conducting an emotion management workshop I did feel like I was an imposter. The residents placed us on a pedestal; that somehow we were of higher social value than them but that could not be farther from the truth when it comes to me personally. In another life, one mistake could have made me a participant of such a workshop rather than a facilitator.
Gracehaven was definitely an experience for me and it did not just open my eyes to the issues at these youths-at-risk face but also definitely an avenue for me to conduct a lot of reflexivity. The learning I gained from Project Gracehaven is something that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, not just at the life stage of being an adult but also in future milestones of being a father myself (hopefully!). Life works in weird ways and I never thought I would be in a module where I could actually carry out a project in direct contact with the subjects I study with constantly in lecture notes and readings but at the same time, I would not trade this experience for anything else.
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