Working for 'social good'

jist whut this erria needs

I’m at an age now where an increasing number of professional conversations and situations I find myself in show me I’m becoming an elder. In all my professional roles since the late 1990’s, I have worked with marginalised communities to which (usually) my only strong connections are solidarity and location. Like lots of professionals working with folks who are persistently excluded, underresourced, and discriminated against, I constantly feel the thin line between support and saviourism. Talking to younger folks coming into the same kind of work I’ve been doing for so long, I hear my cynicism but it’s not unfounded.

This week’s links

Doing two related links again this week, lucky you!

Tom Leonard was a Glaswegian poet who had a lot to say about class and language and formal education, amongst many other things. His poem Liaison Coordinator, published in 1980, is something I keep close and revisit often. Replace ‘liaison coordinator’ with your own job title when you read it the second time and see what it brings up for you. If you’re no good at reading Glaswegian dialect, listen to Tom read the poem.