Essay 2: Knowing Who I Am

When it is all said and done, history will rank the jazz vocalist Gregory Porter among the top five balladeers of all time. He has many great songs, but if I had to pick one that characterizes my field of vocation (youth work), without hesitation, it would be “Painted on Canvas.” The opening stanza reads: “We are like children/ We’re painted on canvases/Picking up shades as we go/We start off with gesso/Brushed on by people we know.” I see youth workers as artists who encounter the blank canvases of youth’s hearts every day. Whether intentional or unintentional, by coincidence, incident or accident, we contribute to the colorful canvas that indelibly saturates the hearts of our youth and ultimately frames their worldview and identities. I work in Out-of-School Time (OST) as the result of a journey to know, reconnect, and understand—a desire to retell a people’s story and thereby come to know my own. My work has focused on engaging Black youth in their African cultural identity and supporting them to be cognizant of racial barriers while at the same time developing racial pride.