Hi there Mark, how're you doing? I'm good. I'm sitting here in your office with Family Services of the North Shore. Tell me, can you give me a little background of what, what do you guys do here?
What do we do. Well we are an organization that works with people with regard to family events in their lives, where we provide counselling or education or support to individuals and their families, to parents and children, as they kind of go through the hurdles and the struggles and possibly the issues that they may confront as a family from one end of life to the other.
Okay. Maybe give me an example of sort of what you mean by providing counselling for?when children get into drugs for instance or??
That's a possible scenario. Another one is just the simple challenge that parents meet in trying to, you know, parent a toddler or preschooler, or school aged child, or an adolescent for that matter. And finding that some of the ways they approach it aren't really solving some of the issues that, you know, arise between themselves and their child. Okay, so just sort of family dynamics?
Precisely.
Okay. What kinds of?is there certain kinds of people you get in here? Younger parents, older parents?
Really a whole array. We certainly see a lot of young families, of young parents, but we see people throughout the life cycle who might be parents with older kids, might be parents with adult children. Might be individuals who aren't in an immediate family situation at that time, they're kind of in between the family they grew up in and the family they may one day have. We say family only because everybody comes connected somewhere to a family, and it shapes kind of a large part of who they are. And sometimes when they get into emotional difficulty, that some of those family relationships that have shaped, you know, how they can cope with the situation that they are confronted by.
Okay. When did this, I don't want to call it a business, what would you call it I guess?? This Agency?
This agency. When did this agency, when did you guys start this up?
Well, it's been?we were part of the Greater Vancouver Family Services Agency for more than, well since 1928 it started in Vancouver. We've been in the North Shore for over 50 years now. And we've been a free-standing agency on our own here in the North Shore for the past 20 years. So a considerable amount of time.
Okay. How did you sort of, I don't want to say fall into, but how did you sort of get to this place. How did I come to be doing this work?
Yes.
Well actually I grew up on the North Shore myself, and was a kid here, and you know, so I know the community, I know the area, I know what it's like to be part of a family in this particular area of the world. However, I also have gone off and taken, you know, training and education and further degrees, and have worked in public and private and not for profit in providing services to families and since more recently becoming a director or an administrator of such services. So I came to it simply by getting more and more involved in providing, you know, service to families, either as a child care worker, as a family support worker, as a social worker, and more recently as a family therapist, and so forth. So, it's been, you know, a long 20 to 30 years of increasingly getting into this work further and more deeply as time went on. Okay. Do you get a lot of people that, with English as a second language here?
In the work I've done both in Vancouver and here on the North Shore we do get a certain amount, probably?well the population here, probably 25%?25,000 people out of the 175,000 people that live on the North Shore are Iranian speaking, plus there's a number of other cultures as well, from Asian and Chinese speaking, and so forth. So we do see a certain proportion of those communities and try to provide language specific help where it's indicated, or certainly just culturally sensitized support to families in need. Do you find that the people that you see are represented by the numbers that are actually in the community or do you find that certain groups are less likely to??
That's a little hard to tell. Some cultures, whether Iranian or Chinese, or any group for that matter, would prefer to have someone who speaks their language, who knows their culture, who's a part of their community. In other instances, because the community is so tight and so small, and so intimate they would prefer it not to be, they want it to be a stranger, someone who doesn't know them so well, someone who can have a certain outsider's perspective of what's happening in their lives. So the proportion is hard to tell, because some may identify, some may not identify, as wanting help from a particular culturally competent source.
Okay. Are there ways for?do you do fundraising, or are there ways for people to get involved in what you do?
Oh there sure are. We rely on volunteers from our board for some of our services, we have a voluntary board that really helps administrate and govern. They work in the agency. We have volunteers who assist us in a number of our programs with palliative care at Lions Gate Hospital, to a number of other areas in our children's centre, and other programs that we provide to the community. And of course we fundraise a lot. You asked how we support our work. A lot of it as an agency comes, you know, from fundraising efforts where we are, we have our own foundation and we reach out to the community and approach individuals and groups and businesses to help support the work that we do to maintain healthier, stronger families and healthier, stronger communities.
Ok. With people that are working in here, obviously, is there?you must have noticed I guess a dramatic shift in background checks and what not when you're working with children. Yes, there's certainly been a shift over the years to the point where anyone who's involved in any way with children and families, and even just counselling in general, whether adults or younger people, requires a criminal record check, or police check to make sure that they are able to provide the safety and the security required to work with, you know, minors and families who are vulnerable and in need. Do you work at all with the, on a high school level, are you connected somehow to??
We're directly and indirectly connected into both elementary and high schools across the North Shore. Our counsellors in both our West Van and our North Van office here have pretty strong ties to, particularly in West Van, where we have someone who's worked in that community for over ten years and is well known and well connected to the counsellors and the administrators of West Van High and Sentinel. Here in North Van it's a little different. We have people more loosely affiliated with schools everywhere from Seycove right over to Carson Graham and Handsworth. So our knowledge of those schools is pretty solid. But you know that's a population that's always changing. Each year there's new families coming in and new families going out of those schools. And adolescence, of course, being a time when kids are growing older and they don't necessarily want to be drawn back in to trying to attend to issues to do with family. They're trying to launch themselves into the world and become more interdependent or independent of family. So the work we do is both offering outreach to groups and to youth, as well as working with families where issues may have come up that require attending to if the child's going to effectively, you know, separate and move on in their own lives. In your sort of experience, and you've obviously been doing this type of work for a long time, do you find that?there's always family issues, but do you find that family issues are maybe getting greater as people get busier and have less time for each other? Or do you find that sort of has been a constant?
That's a good question. I think where there is economic pressures, and where there is time crunches, and when people are doing the dual shift of working during the day and working around home and family at night, and people who are trying to combine dual income and you know all kind?there's not a lot of time at the end of the day, you know, to really connect as family. And we hear, you know, anecdotally and through research that, you know, times that families spend together around the dinner table becomes less and less, and has become less and less over the years. So just common shared time in which families can catch up with one another is more and more precious, more and more a rarity. And kids sometimes contribute to the kind of communication or developmental issues that might come up, and some of the behavioural problems that might develop in a family where there hasn't been enough room for the quality time or the attachment between the generations to occur. Okay. You mentioned something, communicate there, is that, I mean this is probably a redundant question but do you find that most of the problems are from a lack of communication? That families have?
Well, it either comes from a lack of communication or it affects the level at which they communicate but that would be a both an oversimplified way of talking about it, but also a critical way because it's always a component of human behaviour in families is, to the extent to which they would talk about what is going on in their lives, and the extent to which they're able to articulate some of the issues they're confronted by. Always, you know, trying to have just the right amount of exchange where there's enough individual autonomy for any given family member and enough openness and connection to one another as family members to be able to support, you know, a meaningful relationship between them as people. All of that involves communication.
On the same note but slightly different, do you find any common themes that you would attribute to any immigrant group in terms of dealing with their children? I imagine it must be difficult for some people to come over, their children maybe are speaking English, they don't speak English, I'm sure there's some common themes that? Well I think you're highlighting something that's quite important, and it was, we called it at one point in the work with my staff, you know, families that are torn or caught between two worlds. The old world and the old culture where they come from, and certain values and assumptions about how people live and what you can expect of life, and coming to a world where some of those expectations and values are quite different. Beliefs about, you know, what adolescence is, you know, or how close families should be, or particular customs, or you know, ways in which people conduct themselves, are truly different from one place in the world to the other, so we're a bit of a, an old phrase, a melting pot, or a mosaic of colourful and yet disparate life habits and behaviours that can pose a problem between someone who is growing up in a family where they need to make some decisions for themselves as to what their lives will look like and yet they have a certain loyalty and a commitment to their family and where their families come from and what that will entail. Sometimes there's a little more reactivity, a little more heat in that process in the early going, you know, when they're 12, or 14, or 16, or even in their 20's, and they come back to the cultural context of their family and their lives increasingly as they get older. So the things they fought about when they were younger, they in fact become more endeared to or more interested in when they get older. That's what we tend to see in some instances. So it's hard to say at any one time whether you're seeing the whole picture because you almost have to follow it over the course of a number of years to see how families kind of bring this together gradually over the course of time and figure out who they are, not just, not one versus the other, not the old versus the new, but some composition or some combining of the two. Which groups have you found have had maybe the most trouble in a, from a cultural standpoint?
I don't know that anyone has more trouble. I think they are all different. Perhaps, you know, it depends on how many differences there are, how critical those differences are whether it's a custom or religious, whether it's just simply social and some social mores, or whether it's beliefs that are fairly convergent and congruent, or whether they seem conflicted. It depends on what's going on in the world. You have a world in which there's a war on terror going on, and we tend to fear people from certain parts of the world, certain people who look different from us. That can place a great strain on multi-cultural communities and how, as a fabric of our nation we tend to, you know, create strong a interface between those different components without becoming fearful or antagonistic toward one another.
Have you seen any of that, especially in the last year?
Some, but it's hard to say. Or a fall-out from that? September 11th??
Probably in our counselling setting not as greatly, but I think out in the community it may be more of a silent force where people feel a sense of judgement. Maybe the Moslem community. I've certainly seen enough of it in the press and have heard it indirectly, you know, where people feel as though there is the risk of a new kind of prejudice developing towards those are "different from" the mainstream. And that would be unfortunate because it tends to tar too many people in ways that is unjustified, and creates more problems than it solves.
I see. Well, thanks a lot.
You're welcome. It's good talking with you. And have a good week.
Thank you.
