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This is the same posture we must assume when working with our communities
and the individuals within those communities, particularly those that
face hardships. We have to help them find their inner beauty and believe
that there is a different life that they can carve out for themselves.
Whether it is gang members or community members or members of your parish,
when you ask people, across socioeconomic strata, what are their dreams,
you will find that they are very willing to talk. You will find that
their hopes and dreams are not much different than yours.
Appreciative Inquiry serves as the framework for facilitating that
conversation within a context that does not allow negativity to enter
into the dialogue.
When using Appreciative Inquiry as a change strategy with youth gangs,
one will discover a teen not much further beyond the psychological needs
of a child, attempting to cope with their perceptions of reality.
In many cases, this reality is very painful to them, which is why they
assume so much bravado, which becomes their coping mechanism. I fully
believe that a child is a gift from God that should be nurtured. During
the course of my interviewing many of these young people, it was hard for
me to believe all that they have had to endure within their lives, which
when I stopped to think about it, was a very short span of years. Many of
my initial interviewees were not much older than my son who was 15 years
old at the time I began the work, and a number of them were his age. Yet,
the strife that these young people had been exposed to boggled my mind.
I could not begin to conceptualize my own child having to work through so
many issues in his short life and as a result, so many hardships and assaults
on his sense of self and worth.
During the initial stages of my research, the Chicago Tribune published an
article that talked about the biggest enemy of children...indifference.
Whether by social workers, teachers, police officers, judges or the public,
to turn one's back on a child in pain is to guarantee the pain will continue
(Greene, 1999). And, when I began the initial stages of that research I heard
the pain of young people involved in gangs. At every level of their lives they
were told that they had no future, that they are less than other young people,
that adults did not have time for them, and that they would not be able to succeed.
They heard these messages at school, through the media and throughout their
neighborhoods. Some, unfortunately, even heard these messages from home.
Before discounting that there is anything to appreciate about youth in gangs,
or black folk who live in poverty, or just folk in general that we may not want
to encounter, we first need to understand what is missing in their lives and
attempt to help them fill those voids. When asked, these children were more than
willing to tell me how well aware they were that many adults in their world had
written them off, and when we examine what occurs to them in their schools,
it is not uncommon to see the classic Pygmalion study (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968)
being reproduced in multiple educational forums. They communicated a belief that
they have had no choice but to turn to the gang environment, which appeared to them
to be the only environment that offered any element of support.
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