Heroes Do Work In Detention Centers

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I'm a licensed clinical social worker providing behavioral health service in a juvenile detention center in a large urban area. My team is subcontracted to provide these services, so when the time came for organizations to scale back to essential services or essential employees only, we ended up shifting to remote work to limit the number of people going in and out of the detention center. With some trial and error and leaders coming together, we were able to adopt a telehealth platform in order to continue services to the best of our ability and to try to meet the needs of the detention center. From the provider side, we were able to say, “Sure, we can be flexible, we want to support the safety measures in place for the youth.” And I'm thinking to myself, when somebody says “We can be flexible” or “That's not a problem, we can try to meet the needs of whomever,” usually flexibility for our team means some sort of strain on somebody else. Essentially it transfers work to someone else to free up yourself to be flexible. 

Same with the center in this scenario.

Change Yourself and Change the World

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All of us during our lives as children, adolescents and eventually adults need some encouragement. As the individuals we are, we tend to learn differently, have different perspectives and take risks on different levels. For those like myself, words of encouragement were really needed in my life to fulfill my true potential in the activities that I engaged in.