Aftercare Matters: Seeing In the Dark

By CTI Case Manager Sara Barrett

 

So often in social work, it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day aspects, such as paperwork, number-crunching, funding and reports. While all of those things are necessary and important to ensure best practice and accountability in agency spending, I can quickly lose focus on what my true role is in my work when I am in the middle of those things. More often than not, it is my clients who remind me why I am here, in my current role, today.

 

Last week I was meeting with a single father who graduated from the on-site program several months ago. He is two decades older than me, with more life experience than I could ever dream to think up. When I first began Aftercare Services with this man, I thought to myself, “We have every odd against building a rapport with one another-difference in age, generation, race, lifestyle, background. Really, what do I have to offer this person? What is my degree really worth?” During our first meeting, we discussed his lifelong journey through drug use, violence and “running the streets”. He shared how it impacted his children and how it’s led his life to the point of homelessness on more than one occasion. Our goal of the meeting: to determine which part of that lifestyle he could let go of today to keep his newly acquired job and pay his gas bill. He said, “I am seeing I can’t do both, I have to pick a side.”

 

Four months later, our meeting consists of discussion options for his 401K Retirement Plan, including a consultation with a local financial coaching agency and the “proper” way to inquire about information needed from Parent-Teacher Conferences. I reminded him of our first visit, and how different our conversation was today, versus four months ago. We laughed and joked about the difference. I asked him, “What was it, at your age, that finally made you feel strong enough to make the choice to create something new? To do life differently?”  He said, “I didn’t know this could be me,” pointing to his 401K enrollment sheet. “I didn’t see this, but you saw it, Community LINC saw it. You guys have never lied to me, so I just decided to believe it too. I couldn’t see a different future that I had never known before, so I had to see what Community LINC saw, and then it came true.”

 

At the end of the day, after the reports are submitted and the money is balanced; after the case notes are completed and the phone calls are made, my role is clear. It starts with believing the best in and for the people we serve; seeing them beyond their circumstance, and even maybe beyond decades of a lifestyle that has been detrimental to their well-being. If we don’t believe it for them, how can they believe it? I am continually challenged  and renewed in this work by the resilience of the human spirit, to overcome all odds and the humbleness of my clients. It is light in the darkness.