Future Focus: Supporting Education & Career Development in the Era of COVID-19
Published in Children’s Voice Volume 30, Number 1
by Lan To
It’s currently the fall of 2021 and young people and families are facing so many questions about the future—for which answers are few and ever-changing. A season often full of excitement and anticipation for the new academic year is instead riddled with the fears of being back to in-person learning amidst a daunting, continuing public health crisis. In this context of uncertainty, it feels inconceivable yet crucial to write about how youth practitioners are supporting postsecondary success.
We are in the midst of reimagining education and the workforce at every level. The playing field is on fire, and a redesign—not a reconstruction—is underway. By the time you read to increase access to educational attainment and meaningful work for all youth and families? In addition, we are asking: How will we help youth and families understand, navigate, and succeed during this time of great uncertainty? How do we level this new playing field when the field is still trying to establish what the rules will be? The Future Focus program was designed 15 years ago to combat these inequities in education and employment for the most vulnerable youth and families in New York City, and the challenges presented during COVID-19 are yet another battle testing our foundational framework and approach. By focusing on individual counseling practices, programmatic this, at the end of 2021, our lives will have undoubtedly changed as we continue to experience a threefold public health, economic, and political crisis ridden by racial strife and injustice. How do we help young people and families prepare for a future with so much trauma and uncertainty? Moreover, how do we uplift their voices and experiences knowing the policies and outcomes of these crises will impact their lives significantly?
During these historic times, our guiding question at Good Shepherd Services—a community-based organization partnering with youth, families, and communities in New York City—has remained the same: What can we do to level the playing field to increase access to educational attainment and meaningful work for all youth and families? In addition, we are asking: How will we help youth and families understand, navigate, and succeed during this time of great uncertainty? How do we level this new playing field when the field is still trying to establish what the rules will be?
The Future Focus program was designed 15 years ago to combat these inequities in education and employment for the most vulnerable youth and families in New York City, and the challenges presented during COVID-19 are yet another battle testing our foundational framework and approach. By focusing on individual counseling practices, programmatic culture and supports, partnerships, and city-wide advocacy, we tackle the key areas that will have the highest degrees of impact in our participants’ lives. We recognize that when youth and families come to us, the context in which they live their lives already has changed immensely. Family loss and separation—for a multitude of reasons, many of which are couched in systems of poverty and oppression— limit the resources a young person has personally and socially to access their full educational capacities and interests. The scale of change youth and families are experiencing now during the COVID-19 era is like no other, and the restraints we have as human services providers in which to conduct our services and supports are a challenge we have faced like no other. We have tested our commitment and creativity by counseling remotely, conducting cohorts of youth internships through online learning, transformed our offices to remind ourselves of social distancing measures, taken more care that our expressions and tone of voice convey our regards to balance the lack of warmth from a mask or a screen, and constrained our physical connection with a wave or an elbow bump even in times of immense loss and pain. And our participants have adjusted with us. The degree of empathy we all share for these unprecedented times has engendered a level of gratitude and collaborative spirit in our partnerships to help each other maintain, sustain, and thrive.
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Lan To is the former Director of Post-Secondary Initiatives at Good Shepherd Services and Associate Director for Programs in Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School Executive Education. Lan is currently a senior consultant and executive coach at the Community Resource Exchange and serves on the Stewardship Council for #DegreesNYC, a collective action initiative of agencies, institutions and youth leaders across the city working to achieve equity in post-secondary access and completion in New York City.
