The Salvation Army White Shield program has been supporting young & at risk young women for over one hundred years. The program was established in 1899 as a maternity hospital and a home for young, vulnerable mothers. Currently, the White Shield mission is "to empower adolescent girls to lead healthy and productive lives within their families and communities." Either through OYA or DHS, clients arrive at White Shield with infinite circumstances & experiences & are given the opportunity to work with residential treatment counselors & caseworkers who help facilitate their daily schedules, their coping & independent living skills, the rehabilitation of their familial relationships, & ultimately their self worth.
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Salvation Army White Shield
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Andrew Dorie, Residential Treatment Counselor
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My GroupsPersuasive Argument Group
I started this group because my clients have important meetings with caseworkers, other RTCs, parole officers, judges, lawyers, parents, & prospective foster parents every week, if not every day, and I wanted to help them become advocates for themselves. I also, through experience in the program, learned that they have much to learn from one another, as many of them have gone through similar experiences at varying times in their lives. In my Persuasive Argument For Wildflowers Group, I teach the Ancient Greek persuasive argument appeals Pathos, Ethos, & Logos so as to help my clients balance the arguments they make between logic, emotion, and ethics. Often we comprise ethical arguments so as to help the girls appeal for second chances & to convey the more nuanced and hidden strengths of their characters. Since I gained my experience with Persuasive Argument in an academic setting, I transposed to a social/legal context terminology like theses & topic sentences specifically for my clients, so as to help them organize their thoughts before making an appeal & so as to know when they are veering off topic when making a persuasive argument. News Group I started my weekly news group so as to help the girls stay informed. Since the girls are in a program and not privy to the internet or television, they miss out on the chance to read or watch the daily news. In my news group, we read the NY Times & watch documentaries, then we discuss what we read and its implications. Poetry Readings We have so many young poets in our program. So I was inspired to start a poetry reading series, If Not For [Insert Client's name]. The poetry readings have been a great success & have grown to feature short stories and interpretive dance as well. Lecture Series I also run a Lecture Series, which helps us take advantage of the chapel we have on our campus. The idea behind this group was to connect our girls to interesting people around the community. Instead of motivational speakers, I bring in former foster care children or former teenage mothers who are now poets, bus drivers, or financial advisors at PSU to discuss their experiences. These lectures are meant to compensate for many of the conversations a young woman would have with her family or friends as she prepared to finish high school and go on to college, which are conversations that many of our clients miss because of their situations. |
Personal NarrativeMy learning journey consists of many phases, all of which have led me to my work, which I think of as supporting young, institutionalized women as they try to cultivate or re-cultivate a sense of self worth. My job title is Residential Treatment Counselor for the Salvation Army at White Shield, a program that has existed in North West Portland for more than a hundred years. But unfortunately neither my title nor the White Shield program give me the direction I need to help me navigate the complicated system in which my clients are currently stuck. Rather it’s a succession of life experiences, providential encounters with the work of writers such as James Baldwin and Jessa Crispin, and my education as an English major that have helped me cultivate my role in the White Shield program as an advocate for a group of troubled but very resilient young women.
When I was in the fourth grade, a second grader named Tony approached me at recess while I was playing basketball by myself and asked me if I would teach him how to play. This was the first step that I can remember in my learning journey. I was a basketball fanatic at the time. Playing the game was the only activity outside of reading that could hold my interest. So, of course, I agreed to teach Tony how to play. I spent the next three or four months showing him how to dribble, pass, and shoot. Tony was a very bright kid. He picked up the skills quickly, and, after only a week or two of short practices, he began to play with me and the other fourth graders in our very dramatic games of recess basketball. Tony did not just get by in the intense games with the older kids. He and I had an immediate and natural chemistry. We knew where to find each other on the court and how to make each other better. We enjoyed playing with each other. We enjoyed learning from each other and so we excelled and we won a lot of those very dramatic games. But, one day, without warning, Tony did not show up to recess. A week passed. Then a month passed: and no Tony. Now, many years have passed, and I still have no idea what happened to Tony. Though I assume he just moved with his family to another school district. I was heartbroken at the time. I lost a true friend. And I still think about him. I think about our basketball chemistry and the games we won. I think about the way we were underdogs playing against teams comprised solely of older kids and still found a way to win. But I also think about the relationship we developed. I was his mentor and he was my mentee. Before he moved away, Tony gave me my first opportunity to be a teacher and it yielded both a relationship and a feeling I will never forget. By the time I finished junior high, I had more serious issues to consider than how to spend my recess time productively. In fact, when I was thirteen years old, I left home to escape an unsafe and toxic situation. I spent three months living on the streets, where I slept on top of the gym at my school, or in the huge cement pipes that were left by some construction workers in a field in my neighborhood to soon be buried in the ground. But I also spent a lot of nights just sitting in front of the gas station or sitting on the green electric box in front of my friend’s house, waiting for morning, when his parents would go to work and he could sneak me in to get some sleep without them knowing. One night, as I sat on the green electric box in front of an apartment complex waiting for the sun to rise, I looked up and noticed a burst of blue light shining from one of the units on the third floor. Someone’s television was shining out the window, and, I imagined, also shining over her as she slept in her own bed in her own bedroom in her own home. I was inherently so envious of her, whoever she was. I was envious in a way with which I was very unfamiliar. In fact, I would have done anything to be in that bed in the electric blue light from her television. And like Tony, to this day, I still think about her blue light. And I love to fall asleep in front of my TV. I doubt anyone could understand how much I love to fall asleep in front of my TV. This experience was the second step in my learning journey. For I did not realize it when I was younger, but leaving home was a great sacrifice for me. I left absolutely everything, including my sisters and the roof over my head, to live my life the way I wanted to live it. And now that blue light, to me, represents everything I left behind. But it also represents my self worth. That blue light tells me that, even though I was young and did not know what I was doing, I knew I was worth something that had to be somehow preserved and nurtured. A couple years ago, I grew tired of my job. I was working as a waiter in a French restaurant, and, despite all of my attempts to find meaning in my work, had started to despise my industry. I was a very experienced waiter, so I often trained new employees, and was able to apply me love of teaching. I made a decent amount of money, so I was able to go to sleep every night in a nice apartment in the blue light from my TV. I was also helping people every night. But I grew tired of only helping them celebrate. I grew tired of passing and stepping over people who were living in extreme poverty everyday on my way to work, only to help others spend absurd amounts of money to eat half a plate of an Americanized meal that’s recipes had been appropriated from an amalgam of oppressed cultures. But I learned in the restaurant industry that I excel in helping other people. In fact it’s one of my greatest strengths, so I consider the Kafkaesque restaurant industry the third step in my learning journey. I was a great servers’ assistant before I started waiting my own tables. I was able to anticipate both my servers’ and my guests’ (ridiculous) needs before they even knew what they needed. And, when I became a server, I was able to apply the skill in a new context. But the world through which I would ride my bike to the restaurant seemed to be falling down all around me. In fact, the more my sense of self worth grew the closer I looked, and the more I seemed to notice that world had never stood as tall as I had remembered it standing. And I wanted a bigger and more substantial role in the effort to support it. So, one day, I finally left the restaurant industry and signed up for classes at the community college. That same day, I saw my wife for the first time. She is a college professor of writing, who also has dedicated her life to serving her community. And before I was a junior in college, I got a job as a residential treatment counselor at the Salvation Army White Shield. My new job as a counselor gave me the opportunity to teach, to help the girls with whom I work cultivate a sense of self worth, and to anticipate their needs and what they need to grow (for a fraction of the salary I made as a waiter). But I encounter many issues in my work. The job does not pay much, and so many of my coworkers are underpaid or unhappy. The girls bear the brunt of these issues. My coworkers grow resentful and take the anger the girls express personally. Somewhere along the way, my coworkers stopped trying to help the girls cultivate a sense of self-worth and started trying to civilize them. In Walk Out, Walk On, Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze write about the “[Greek Gods] having a party up on Mount Olympus, feasting on ambrosia nectar and lazing about on thrones forged by Hephaestus” (161), as they arrive in Greece. I often imagine DHS and OYA and the state and federal government in the same sense as I arrive for my shifts with the girls, who are completely disconnected from the invisible agents that control their lives and their futures. But I forge ahead anyway, not knowing exactly where I will end up, but knowing I have taken profound and formidable steps to arrive at my current destination, and so I challenge myself to trust my instinct. And I listen to writers such as Jessa Crispin, who wrote in Why I’m not a Feminist: A Manifesto, “It’s lonely outside the system. But we need you there” (64). And I listen to James Baldwin, who said, Well, I know this, anyone's whose tried to live knows this: that what you say about anyone else... reveals you. What I think of you as being is dictated by my own necessities, my own psychology, my own fears and desires. I'm not describing you when I talk about you. I'm describing me. (LitGriot.com) I take from Crispin’s quotation encouragement to exist in my work outside or beyond my coworkers’ expectations and efforts, for, I fear, those abbreviated expectations and half efforts only support a toxic status quo. And I take from Baldwin’s quotation the idea that our social issues stem from our spirituality, or our collective lack of spirituality, which encourages me. For I have not encountered yet a movement to address our country’s collective spirit. And this is the kind of work with which I am comfortable and familiar and optimistic. I, myself, had to cultivate my own spirit and then recultivated my own spirit. And so that is what I try to do for my clients. These are just a few of the steps I took that led me to my work, which is either another step or the end of a complex pattern. I believe without these steps, I would probably still love to teach, and value self worth, and want to participate in my community. For I believe some people are just more biologically equipped for helping others and so they should be supported in their effort to do so. But I don’t know if I would feel as confident as I do now when I encounter crisis. I don’t know if I would connect with the girls through our common ground. And so I feel lucky to find my work so providential. |
My WOrk
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Social COntext & My Goalsd
I perform my work in NW Portland, Oregon. My state is currently in a foster care crisis. Many young children are homeless, living in unsafe environments, living in the wrong program, or even living in hotel rooms with their DHS caseworkers until they can be placed in a new program or foster home. Partly because of this foster care crisis, most of our clients feel unwanted and struggle to feel self worth. Thusly, my main goal at White Shield, and as a residential treatment counselor, is to refrain from trying to civilize my clients and instead focus on helping them cultivate a sense of self worth. Social work, especially work with at risk children, can be an institution in which both counselor & client can struggle to mark or notice success. I believe this leads to chaos. However, I do believe it is possible to help a child or teenager feel good about herself and her future again. I've learned that most of my clients are looking for opportunities to feel or prove they are worthless. But I've also learned that most of my clients are desperately searching for opportunities to feel or prove they are respected, needed, wanted, & loved. This bifurcated dichotomy can be an impossible obstacle in the most challenging circumstances, but it can also be the key to cultivating growth in the right situation. I try to achieve my goal of helping my clients feel self worth again by firstly taking care of myself so that I arrive at work in the right state of mind to be selfless. I have to remind myself everyday to be prepared to not take things personally. I also think it is important to take care of myself so that the excitement I feel to see them is evident in my body language and not distorted by signs of some issue in my personal life. I think both of these aspects of my work allow my clients to be vulnerable with me. Next, I try to be prepared for the day so that I can keep them busy & give them less time to worry or consider their current predicament. So I prepare for the groups I teach & make sure I bring to work anything I told them I would bring with me, which could be a book or a movie or a fake tattoo. Then I try to keep them busy. I try to keep my promises and facilitate the activities I promised to facilitate. I try to make myself available for one on one check ins. A big part of my work is teaching them how to use persuasive argument & assertive communication skills, so often I end up sitting down with one of them to help craft a letter to a parent, or judge, or caseworker. I encourage them to organize their thoughts and feelings before trying to appeal to someone else to adopt their beliefs. |