3/25/2021
I had the pleasure of learning from Dennis Morrow, Executive Direct of Janus Youth Programs. He was able to share and brainstorm some challenges and possible solutions to the residential component of this project. He has had a serendipitous career path, and maybe we can raise the floor of luck so more people can have an adventurous path to meaning. We discuss how a host family /foster network local to the school might be a more practical solution to housing and sleeping. We touch on how important family support is to education. Why we need to disrupt the school to prison pipeline. He ends with a powerful recognition of the cost to not supporting our children.
“did our own calculations for a grant we received and determined that the estimated “cost” to society of a homeless youth who “ages out” into adult services (which we consider over 25) will result in additional costs of: $2.1 million for males and $2.7 million for females (due to added costs of children’s needs). The estimate included health care, mental health/addiction services, foster care for kids, incarceration, etc. I did see a number nationally that it would be $3.1 million but don’t remember where this came from. So if we at Janus are currently paying rent for over 150 youth daily and 85-95% of them will maintain their own housing…do the math on what this means for our community…”
keevin bybee 0:00
Welcome to the one school podcast. My name is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician, trying to look at real preventative care by exploring how we can have schools be a 20 473 165 day safe space for our community’s children by having conversations with relevant domain experts. Today, I’m speaking with Dennis Morrow, Executive Director of janas youth programs in Portland, Oregon. Dennis, thanks for joining me today. I would love to hear how you found yourself where you’re at on the other side of an internet call with me today and why you think figuring out a way to make our schools room more robust is a worthwhile project.
dennis morrow 0:43
All right, well, thank you for inviting me. And I’d say I’m always interested in creative ideas. And I think this is one of the more creative that I’ve seen for a long time. That’s what intrigues me. I come to you, via Janice, I’m not representing Janice today. But this has been my career. I started working at Janice in 1980. And told him I’d be here for three to five years because I get bored really easy. But you can pretty well assume hasn’t been boring since then. We started out as a small actually one of the first seven residential treatment programs in the country as a as a pilot project as a model, attempting to figure out how to work with teenagers that had drug problems. This was in 1972. Basically, because there were a lot of kids that were using drugs back then. And a lot of adults were using drugs. But there wasn’t a lot of help, because nobody thought they were a problem. But people in the community began to see this as an issue. They brought it forward. And then Janice actually was formed to begin to address that. I got connected because I moved to Oregon in 1973. I went to school, I have a career, I call it career by random chance, because all of the choices I made in my career, they didn’t work out, but they ended up working out better long term. So I graduated from Stanford University with a scholarship with a degree in journalism, applied for a job at a bank and didn’t get it and didn’t know what to do. So I went into Vista, which is a volunteer program for a year. And that’s where I learned about, you can actually have a job helping other people. I never heard of that before. So then I got a scholarship and went to Washington, DC and got a two year degree in in rehabilitation counseling. But while I was there, I met my lifetime mentor, Jim Kenny, who taught me about the addiction, the issue of addiction, which again, was very, very early in the field. So I moved to Oregon in 1973. And Jim followed me a couple years after that, and actually was hired to be a counselor in the first method on treatment program in the history of the state. So we had addicts who had been addicted to a medical study to methadone and the federal government required to get treatment and we had to start, I was a supervisor and a counselor in that program. So that’s how I got connected. And I connected with Janice was that my, my boss, his wife, actually was the clinical director at Janice. So he was my supervisor de methadone program, she was working on the teenage side, I had more experience in some of the drug issues that they were beginning to face, as the program would continue to age up. But then she had more experience on the social work side. So we traded services back and forth. And I got to know something about Janice. And when the executive director left, they asked me to apply. I didn’t think I wanted to do that. But one more time I did it because I had some friends over here. And they said, Yeah, you got to come. And then I did. So another, another random choice. So that’s been my so Jana, so the reason that we get connected to you all is Janice over the years has grown to be one of the larger service agencies in Oregon. working specifically with high risk very high risk teenagers and young adults that actually now teen moms and also baby infant babies as well. But our program, we have over 40 programs at 20 different locations. We’re in Oregon, we’re also the only program in Southwest Washington working with homeless and runaway youth on the streets, and had a large number of those programs in Oregon, but we have 40 programs at 20 locations. And we work with the last time we put a year’s a year together, we had worked with over 6000 kids, but literally not a single one of them ought to ever need a service like we provided if they had what they deserve to have from their families in the community when they were kids. And that’s what makes me a believer in prevention because I believe we have some of the most successful programs in the country in terms of the youth we work with. But I tell parents, there’s not a single youth that I’d ever need a janas program if they were getting what they what they deserved at home. So I think you’ve got a wild and crazy idea here. But there’s a lot of stuff around the edges I like and I think we have to have some wild and crazy ideas because I don’t want to have to have Janice keep growing. I don’t think we I don’t think we had a need to get bigger. But that’s that’s the connection that we made.
keevin bybee 5:00
Amazing stuff. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to be in a position where you’re actively trying to work yourself out of a job, right? Yes, I had had the fortune to volunteer with yellow brick road, which is one of Janice’s programs when I was applying to medical school, and it was very eye opening, and very humanizing for people who are very easy to dismiss. And so it’s a an opportunity that I am forever grateful for and changed by. So thanks for helping me get to where I am today as well. Well,
dennis morrow 5:34
that’s just a quick example. If you look at we are one of the larger providers of homeless services for youth on the streets, again, in Oregon, and perhaps in the Northwest. Numbers, because we do so much street outreach, we still do street outreach in Oregon, we still do it in Clark County as well. We have emergency shelters, and we have some long term transitional facilities. But we also have a number of other agencies we work with to do that. But when I do presentations in the community about homeless youth, I started out by saying, Let’s not talk about homeless youth because if I say homeless youth to you, you’re going to imagine a drugged out kid on a freeway with a sign saying, Give me your money. And I said, How about instead of that we call it family, less children. Because I don’t know a single kid. And most of these youth leave home in their early to mid teens. I don’t know anybody who’s 1415 years old, that says I’d rather go out and sleep in the rain tonight and be home if I had a home that was safe to be there for. So I tell him if we want to prevent homeless youth, we have to create programs that will prevent family less children, because that’s what we’re creating generation after generation.
keevin bybee 6:42
Exactly. None of these programs exist in a silo, none of any problems that we’re trying to address exist in a silo and exactly that that what the How do we address the intergenerational trauma, the intergenerational poverty, and like you said, wildin, craziest parts of my idea was I just kept thinking about a patient of mine who had had no safe place to go. He wouldn’t have qualified for any of the homeless shelters. And he was to kind of dysregulated for most homeless shelters. And so I always thought it would be great if the school itself could be a place where kids could spend the night if they needed to. But apparently, that is pretty out there. And so why is that? Not the best logistical solution to filling a hole for how do we keep kids safe at night?
dennis morrow 7:37
Well, I think the starting point is it’s going to be very difficult for a school, which is a public entity, in his responsibilities area, to take on the liability of having youth and kids who would be there overnight, because that’s a huge increase in a completely different mission. And so I think part of it could just be the the difficulty of working with that, that entity around how to do that. But as we were talking before, the one of the biggest barriers I see to that is that if you are going to have kids under 18, sleeping with you, then you become a licensed shelter, you become a licensed program of some kind. And then you have to go through very stringent licensing standards. They have like I forget what it is. But I when it comes to our programs on an annual basis, they have a checklist, it’s got like, I think 280 different items that they have to they look at and they walk through the building. And then you have to have staff and the staff all have to be trained to a certain level, you have to have records a document that training, any kind of issue within the program has to have an incident report that’s filed with the state and they investigate that. So the issue is it’s a very, in, in the old days, again, it used to be you could just open up a program and say come on in and sleep and that would be fine. But what we have now is if they’re under 18, and the younger they are the more the stringency goes up around that. But our shelters, we have shelters for 12 to one shelter this 12 to 18 years old. And then we have a couple of shelters that we operate that are like 18 to 25, and even the 18 to 25. If they’re under 21, we still have to have some stuff that we do with them. But under 18, it’s a very, I don’t call it rigid from a negative standpoint, it’s protective, because what the state has learned over time, and this is a national trend is when they did not pay attention to this stuff. They had agencies where kids were getting abused. And similarly with foster care when you had foster parents when they weren’t regulating it. So they take very seriously now their responsibility and we consider them a partner. But part of the partnership is they come in and they give us that list and they have a scheduled visit they do every year and then they have an unscheduled visit so they just call up one day and say we’re coming in and we’re going to walk through and we need to make sure that if you’re feeding kids and it’s going to be okay let me just let me see where’s all of your all of your staff have food handlers training do all of your we used to use volunteers that would like churches Oftentimes would cook meals for our homeless youth shelters downtown, we have to the only two shelters in Portland for homeless youth. And that was a huge cost savings and a huge lack of complication for us. And then the state came through and said, if that food is going to these kids, then you have to prove that the kitchen where it was made, was a licensed kitchen, which meant the church kitchen, or if somebody cook the dinner, and sometimes we’d have people who just cook stuff in their homes and bring it down there. And the kids loved it. And we loved it. And we actually had to shift and now we have to prepare all of that food on site at a much higher cost. But the issue was they literally said you can’t take you cannot let food come into this door, you can’t come through that door unless you know it came from a certified kitchen. And so that that’s the level of and I again, I don’t think that’s a great difficulty. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because there’s coming from issues where kids have not been taken care of. But it does say the idea of just having a place where kids can sleep is not as easy as it was 30 years ago. So I think you have to look at some different models around that. Well, just one of the things that, again, we had had some earlier conversations, and one of the things that I mentioned to you was this concept of what we call a host home model.
And host homes are when you have it’s like a foster home model. But it may not it may not be some it may not be a state foster care, operated by the state, it could be a host home could be somebody that a nonprofit agency has a group of we have several nonprofits that use this model for alternate shelter or alternate living situations for kids under certain kinds of emergency circumstances. Way back in the early days, when we were doing working with runaway kids, we actually the original model, before we had a shelter was we had volunteer homes. And again, these were volunteers that came through churches, because our program was started actually one of our programs by ecumenical ministries of Oregon by a church based group. And so they had volunteer homes, and if a kid needed a home, we could, but the homes had to be licensed and all of that, we could take care of that. But then they would do that for free. So that let also cut the cost way down on that. So as we were talking what my thought was, if you actually are able to get a site, beginning for a school, and you want to offer that service of having emergency housing. For the older kids, we have a couple of shelters in town that are currently available ours that we operate, that they could get into. And one of them that’s just exactly up to age 18. That’s exactly who it’s for any kid anywhere that’s on the street that night and does not have a safe place to go to. And right now there’s a 24 hour availability. But particularly for the younger kids, like 10 or 11, and under, then you’re looking at these host homes could be a great, I think a great possibility for you. And potentially you could even get some volunteer services around that.
keevin bybee 12:51
Fantastic. That’s exactly the kind of thing that I wouldn’t have been aware of or realized how difficult it would have been in it’s a nice, you know, practical alternative to AI. So I’m definitely gonna have to start talking to ecumenical ministries that are somebody else in the that. That world do you see any issues with, for example, if there was, you know, the gym or the library of a school was open? 24? Seven, so at least there’s a warm place to stay. If a kid just needed to spend a few hours out of the cold and check their email? Is that something that would be viable with less? difficulty?
dennis morrow 13:36
Yeah, there were a drop in center and not a shelter. Now, if you and I don’t know there, because we work with the teenagers, so but I’m not sure there’s probably an age where you still would have to have some kind of licensing or oversight, I think, but I don’t know for sure. But yeah, that’s a complete, that’s a completely different, somebody is coming in to get some hot chocolate, that’s different than coming in to spend the night.
keevin bybee 14:02
Okay? Again, just, you know, they may not need to spend the night but if it’s cold outside, and they just need somewhere and they didn’t know where else to go thinking about how to have at least the lights on at the school nearby so that when you don’t know where to go, just go to school, there’s kind of my philosophy.
Unknown Speaker 14:21
Um,
keevin bybee 14:23
so you’ve had a lot of experience with, you know, addiction. And so I’m just curious if, you know, homeless youth and addiction go hand in hand, and how important is it to interrupt the the addiction cycle when when kids are young? And is there a way that you would use that experience to inform school structure or school culture?
dennis morrow 14:53
Well, I think what we know about drug use is prevention is more effective than intervention. And the younger, the better. Those are kind of the core elements. When I came to Oregon and started working in Now, again, the methadone treatment program now we’re talking about people who are active. heroin or opiate users in qualify for this medical substitute, which is an opiate also, but it’s a legal substitute that can be managed safely. And that’s what we what we did with him. But we had people, many young people in their 20s in that program over time, but in terms of what happens if you don’t catch it in time, the oldest client ever worked with I still remember his name was Morgan. And he had he had the number 0007, we numbered clients, and to keep confidentiality in play. So that meant he was the seventh person to ever get methadone in the state of Oregon. And he was 89 years old when I started working with him. Now, this man had become an addict in the 1800s. Before it was illegal. I didn’t know until I until he told me his life story. In 1917, they passed the Harrison narcotic act, he had become an addict. He was an African American man. And he worked on the railroads, when they were building the railroads. He worked with Chinese and the Chinese had the highest opium quality opium in the world. They wouldn’t let him have any because he wasn’t Chinese. But he slept in the bunk. And they actually called it a bunk habit that you if you had an enclosed space, and they were smoking all night, you would still get high. And so he became a legal addict, he could go down to 10, down to the drugstore. And for a nickel, you could buy a bottle of coating and drink and he was fine. And then in 17, they made him a criminal. And he had a life history of moving he had to five or six different programs the federal government had opened around the country, and he got to our program. And that was where he finally stabilized because he got the methadone treatment. And he was at nine when I started working with him. He was 92, when I was able to successfully detox him from heroin. And we were able to do that, because he was willing to make a commitment that it needed to be able to follow through and do what it what it took. And he was had a lot of energy. You know, he said, the drugs kept me on. And he came back about five years later. And he Three years later, so 95, and he was still just full of energy. And he had gotten to go back and visit his family on the East Coast, which he couldn’t travel or do any of that stuff. But what that man taught me was number one, it’s not always the person’s fault when you’re using drugs. And number two, it is possible, it is always possible for recovery to happen. And I had, I could give you another dozen other stories that represent that different ones. But he’s, he’s my most oldest, but it just said, you know, he waited 89 years to get to finally get the help he needed. And then three years after that he was able to become drug free and stay drug free for the rest of his life. So I’m a believer in treatment, but I would rather do the prevention work and the front end if we can particularly for the kids side of it.
keevin bybee 17:55
Absolutely great motivational story. And another shameless plug for how criminalization and the drug war only make things worse in some way, right? Oh, yeah.
Unknown Speaker 18:07
Yeah, absolutely.
keevin bybee 18:08
You had mentioned you went to a boarding prep school? And is there anything about your experience, you think that would inform what we could do with public schools that couldn’t make them, you know, a more inclusive community? Is there anything from that model that would be applicable or could be applicable to, you know, a public school? That’s a 24, seven Safety Safety spot for our kids?
dennis morrow 18:33
Well, I don’t think it would inform what you could do. And when maybe a couple areas. What it did for me was what you couldn’t do. Because I was a only child in a small town, 750 people in central middle of Iowa, a farm town. And I got a scholarship to go to a prep school on the east coast. And it was one of the two highest level preparatory college and prep schools or college preparation school in the country at that time. And they were giving scholarships away to try and expand there because all they had was a bunch of rich kids locked up together and they wanted to start expanding culturally. So before there was race, and gender there was like economic so they were trying to get poor kids in so that the other kids would have somebody to meet that was it all just look like Tim. So in a lot of ways we were the we weren’t we weren’t. We were the minority. I mean, that’s what we were brought in to be that and I went to school with people like David Eisenhower, who was I said, You know, I show Haifa to was Jay Heifetz or Jay Heifetz, who was Joshua Heifetz the violinist I went to, you know, these people owned huge corporations owned whole mountains and whole islands and that was their life. And, and as a scholarship student, part of what we had to do is we all had jobs that we had to do scholarships. jobs to earn our money, that we weren’t really earning it. But it was like, Okay, if you’re gonna be here for free, then you’re gonna have to help check this out or clean this out or do the dishes or hand out the food at lunch or do something like that. So I really understood from the very deep level, I didn’t know it at that point in time. But when when we got to racism and sexism, it was like, I understood what was going on as a white boy, being a white boy who was not accepted into the culture in the same way. Not to say the school wasn’t attempting to do that. But now, what I, what I learned was, I think the one thing that that school did better than any place I’ve ever seen, is we had very small classes, we never had more than 10 or 12 Kids boys in a class. And that gave you an enormous opportunity to focus in and learn. And that’s where I learned to think, where I learned to analyze or I learned to write. And I became a journalism major, because I already knew how to write by the time I was, I was writing term papers. By that time, I was a sophomore, or, you know, junior in high school. So what the school taught me is, there’s a different way to do education than throwing 20 or 30 kids into a classroom and over everyone, teacher further sponsibility for trying to do all of that. And that was, I call it very personalized teaching that we got in very close relationship with those teachers. And that part, it taught me the other stuff it taught me. As you can see, I went from New Hampshire to California. So I was trying to get out as far away as I could. And my only criteria was it had to be a high quality college that also was co educational, because I was not going to spend at the time Ivy League was also Oh, boy, all boys. And I was not going to spend four more years of my life locked up without any kind of interaction with a female gender. Let’s put it that way. Fair enough. Fair
keevin bybee 21:51
enough. Yeah, I think you’re touching on a real good port, part of you know, you know, all the levels of diversity and you know, especially class mixing, which is a you know, big issue these days, I mean, not that it ever wasn’t but especially with the the widening wealth gap and thinking about how we can make the these places inviting for for everybody so that it doesn’t become a place for just the quote those people. That’s a big thing that I’d like to keep in mind is how does an organization like this be attractive to everybody so that everybody gets to mix and we all learn how everybody or at least learn how more people live and therefore more people are humanized? Definitely the school or the teacher to student ratio is so huge. And I think that’s a money issue. And hopefully, Elan Musk is listening to this, and he can help us fund better student teacher ratio.
dennis morrow 22:49
Yeah, I don’t blame the teacher for what they can control. I see I own a huge number of really great, I mean, in my own life, but also in my career sense and just really incredibly compassionate, dedicated. But you know, if you look at if you’re a high school teacher, and you have in Portland now six to eight classes a day, and you have 25 to 35 kids in a class. It’s like, and when I’ve had, I’ve had meetings with teachers, and it’s like, it’s like they they want to, they want to interact and support the kids, but they are just simply at an overwhelmed point in terms of their physical ability to do it. I do another one of my hobbies is I do classes for parents going through a divorce in Multnomah County in Clackamas County, we have them throughout the state, but in those two counties as the same. And the classes if you are a parent, and you are going through a divorce or Legal Separation Agreement, then you’re required to take that class. And I helped design that 21 years ago, and I’ve been doing it ever since. So I’ve now worked with and talk to over 20,000 divorcing parents, literally, with kids of all ages. And many of the divorcing parents, particularly when you get to the length of late June and July, a lot of times we get teachers that come into those classes, because that’s when they can be in there. And I’ve had teachers in groups that I’m operating in those classes, and they will say they’re just so frustrated because they they want to work with all of the all of the kids but they can’t. And they want to work with they want to support parents. And many of the teachers will say I can’t call 30 parents every day or every week, but if you call me I’ll call you back, you know if you make the so what I try and coach parents around in the current school system is make an ally of your teacher and your guidance counselor and go to school in the first couple three weeks of school and meet all of the teachers after school when school is not in session. Give him your contact information. And here’s a way to get hold of me anytime of the day or night. And then every couple of weeks check in with him and see how it’s going. Because if you want to look at the the the failure of this I know when I’ve had and I’ve got a pretty big family I can tell you about myself which also put some perspective on this but I multiple times, like in high school, they used to do the back to school night in Portland the week before Thanksgiving. And that’s when, as a parent of a high school, so if you had a freshman in high school, you’d go back to school. And then you go into the gym and you sign up with a teacher that does, all the different teachers have their class lists out. And I can remember being at a table with a teacher, and then next to me is another teacher and the parents signing up. And then the teacher looks at him looks out the gradebook and goes, Oh, I haven’t seen your kid since the second week of school. Or, oh, your kid dropped out last month, didn’t she tell you. And I mean, I’ve seen parents that didn’t know their kids dropped out until they went to the back to school, right. And so what I tell parents is, and if you have kids who have had early life trauma, they’re higher risk of dropping out, kids going through divorce at higher risk of dropping out. So I say if I believe all parents should do this, but if you have kids that are at any kind of risk, then make the school your ally, because they want to be in the teachers want to be there. But you have to reach out to them. And be be the one that they will call because they have the contact information. And they know you’re checking in every couple of weeks and doing that. So I like people can’t see me, but I’m putting my hands together. And I like I like blending and becoming a partner with with a school because I’ve never seen a teacher or a guidance counselor that didn’t care. But I’ve seen them with too much work to ever do everything they absolutely want to do. Absolutely.
keevin bybee 26:27
You know, you’ve touched on a great point again, which is how do we get the families involved or support the families so that they can be involved? You know, I can only imagine people who are already burning the candle from both ends, wouldn’t it be great if we could pay parents to do these classes, you know, go to parenting classes, go to divorce classes for your kid at school classes, and people respond to incentives, I think it would be another investment that might pay itself off over the long term by giving people the resources to get involved the way you had recommended, they would?
dennis morrow 27:04
Well, I just I look at the response. If you look at the classes we have for divorcing parents, there’s about 30 people in the class, and it was not COVID times they have to pay for the class. And after work, or on a Saturday morning, spend three and a half hours, drive to the location and be there, which means I got to take care of the kid and everything else somewhere else. And they have to do that in order to legally finish off either the divorce or the or the Separation Agreement. So what we know is when they come in the door, cuz I actually had to go to oils, classes because of stuff was happening in my family. And when I went in the door, I didn’t want to be there, I just wanted to get the damn thing and get that. But at the end, we give them feedback sheets, and they will fill out the feedback. And most of them will say I am so thankful I never knew this, I never realized this. This is the most important thing I could have learned I am there for my kids. And because they want to be there for the kids. And we tell them we’re not here about the divorce we’re here about. Because if you look at failure rates for kids, what you see is we have about a 50% divorce rate in this country today or separation because many of the people aren’t even legally married now. And they’ve been tracking that for about 50 years. And the data shows that about 30% of kids coming out of a separation process are at high risk for the stuff that you’re talking about wanting to prevent later. That high risk for runaway from home at high risk for drop out from school, if you drop out from school, then it becomes a risk for you. I risk of early teen pregnancy. And it’s not the divorce that causes the damage. That’s what we tell the parents and kids are not doing it to themselves. So it’s things that we as parents can do. And if we do those, I always tell people, you won’t have perfect kids. But you’ll have a perfectly normal kid who will drive you nuts when they’re a teenager, but there’ll be alive and well to talk about when they’re in their 20s. And what do you ever don’t ever want to be as a parent who your kid takes you out to lunch when they’re 25? And they say Where were you or why didn’t you that’s the piece here. And so we have parents who come in angry, resistant and unmotivated. And they go out excited and enthused and believing that there’s something they can do to really help their kids. But you’ve got to be able to give them we got to give them that information at a time when it’s it’s useful. And that’s one of them. I always I tell him actually, I say when I’m doing these classes at night is because I don’t ever want to see your kids in my day job. Because if you think of the programs, Janice operates boys in the juvenile justice system, homeless youth and teen mothers. Every one of those categories, disproportionately high numbers of youth who have been through a separation process. And it’s not the separation, getting a divorce or separating doesn’t cause kids to have harm, and they don’t do it to themselves. So it’s how we as parents manage it. Then we can, again not have perfect kids but perfectly normal kids and I said that’s the gift you’re giving them is they get to have the life that they deserve.
keevin bybee 29:52
There you go one more plug to keep our schools open 24 seven so that they don’t have to worry about daycare, they can bring their kids to the school to get their parents classes and we can, you know, motivate them to get in there. And then they’d be, they’d see the benefits and be willing to come back. You mentioned a couple of interesting buzzwords that I’d love for you to kind of give us a little bit more detail on the so the seven C’s of resilience and positive youth development, like, how are those things that would be valuable to this project?
dennis morrow 30:29
Well, positive youth development, the first program that Janice operated for homeless use was called bridge house. It was opened in 1984. And it was one of seven, it was one of seven model programs in the country trying to figure out how do you help homeless youth get off of the street successfully. And the person that found that a Jerry fast started out with he didn’t call it positive youth development, but that’s what we call it today. But his concept was that if you’re going to help a use, you have to believe that they have the answers. And you have to believe they have the strength, and they have the ability. And so our job is to help them develop positively and provide what they need to do that. What they don’t need is they don’t need a parent, they don’t need an alternate parent, they don’t need a whole lot of rules that they’re going to break and then get penalties for. But you so he created a model that was called positive youth development, which is how do we work in a supportive relationship with a youth and it’s not doing too is working with to help them identify what they want to achieve, and then help them achieve it. At that program, historically, has had one of the highest success rates in the country, have you successfully transitioning into their own apartments getting a job and staying in it after they after they get done as homeless, but but so the positive youth development is kind of the scientific realm that came around this as people started looking at this about 20 years ago or so. And it started has been developing ever since. Then what we have is we call the seven C’s of resilience. And those are the seven C’s, if you think of it, listen to this competence. So you believe the youth has competence. We’re helping the youth gain confidence, make a contribution, feel a connection, find coping skills, be in control of their life, and develop their character. So we have seven seas, and that’s what the staff are trained This is your job is not to do it to them. You know not to be the parent, not even I say, not to be a counselor who has answers, you have to believe those youth can find the answers for themselves. And your job is to help them figure out how to do that. And that’s been a model that’s national now. But it’s really, we believe in it really fully in terms of the work that we’re doing with it with the kids that we’re working with. We take youth who have been in jail. Now imagine this, we have one of our programs that works with us coming out of jail, I call it what they call youth incarceration, but it’s a jail. And they’re 17, or 18 to 25 years old, we had a 22 year old us who a couple three years ago came into that program, he had been incarcerated for nine years. Do the math, he’s 22. His entire developmental adolescent process was in a locked institution, where he’s not going to learn anything you need to know to how to survive on the outside. But when you can get into a program that can begin to believe in Him, encourage him finish his degree, if he needs to do what he needs to do to get a job, figure out how to do a budget, and those years will transition into their own. We have another program that’s called the hope partnership that works with youth in jail, we take volunteers that go into the incarcerated situation and do proactive, we call it pro social workshops with the guys learning workshops. We got a Toastmasters club, in that in that jail. And those guys are brilliant speakers, we bring them out and do use them as public speakers for our events, because they are just incredible voices once they learn how to do that. But what most people don’t realize we also have a scholarship program. And Janice gives scholarships and the majority, the vast majority of our scholarships go to young men who are incarcerated. And we have boys who have graduated with bachelor’s degrees in jail, who have graduated with master’s degrees in jail. We have a viewer who just got clemency and got out and is going to school social work at PSU as a master’s degree student. So But you see, we believe that they have the capability to say what you got a kid in jail? How are they going to go to college that no, they want to do that they want to or they want to earn credits, and then they want to earn a degree, and then all of a sudden they want to earn another degree. And if you believe they can do it and make it possible. That’s what we see. That’s positive youth development, I think at its most basic level. Yeah, that
keevin bybee 34:41
resonates highly with me on so many levels. You know, you’re giving somebody resources and putting them in an environment where they can grow. You’re not labeling them with an intrinsic moral failing that makes them bad people but you, like you said, find the good things in them because they’ve got the answer. They just need to be in an environment in which they can develop and grow, you know, Garden, so to speak. You know, you touched on, you know, incarceration again, and it just irritates me with without saying anything expletive about the whole process of how we can find the money to spend $450,000 a year on an individual to keep them in prison, but we won’t spend that same money to house them and put them through college. And, you know, you just mentioned how expensive it was to run a small us shelter. And yet we’re we have almost zero qualms at all about keeping people in a prison industrial complex instead of actually, you know, restoratively rehabilitating them. So Well, actually,
let’s take them as I can. One more thing I know when I think it might be getting near time here, but just put it out there, you can edit it in or edit it out. But uh, the other area that I am very passionate about is you’re on the edge of it there. But it is like schools and how our schools and society deal with boys and men. And what we see is research that I’ve done, and I have a class that’s called men and addiction, that I teach A Portland Community College where we look at what are the gender specific? What are the gender differences in brains and biology between males and females? And then how do we accommodate that? Everything from parenting, to our school systems, to our counseling systems. And you were talking about the prison industrial complex, I talked about the school to jail pipeline,
dennis morrow 36:40
Because what you find, and again, this isn’t intentional, this is unintentional stuff that we don’t look at. Boy brains and boy biology. Now this is not this is not gender orientation, that is a separate issue. And that is like I always say that’s an add on, you’re a male, you’re in trouble. If you’re a gay male, then you’re really in trouble in terms of a lot of these systems, not in trouble like that, but not going to be you’re going to be underserved, or miss or by the system is set up against you in a lot of ways.
I have a model that I call the malebox, ma le, which is what boys are born into. And what my students said, Well, I’m an African American male, and I realized, Dennis, I’m living in a box inside your box, I have an African American malebox that I have to survive in. And if I get out of that, I’m still trapped in the societal box, and I’m behind. So so these are things I don’t want people to confuse or think I’m not I’m not looking at that. But what do we know, we know things like testosterone is a movement hormone. And boys are born with more testosterone than girls, that’s how you get a boy brain is you have two doses of testosterone in the uterus that girls don’t get. And what makes you a male, a male brain, and it gives you a high level of activity. So in order to, in order to succeed in school, you just have to sit still? Well, it’s hard for boys to sit still. You have girls have the language Speech and Language Center and a female brain is 350% larger than the male brain. So every minute or hour a girl is producing 350 times more words than a boy. They do a good and counseling Tell me what you’re feeling. And girl brains Connect emotions to vocabulary boy brain stone. So saying, What do you feeling to a boy is like talking a foreign language. But then he feels defective, because you can’t do it. So we fail in school, because not because we’re intentionally but unintentionally not taking this into account in most schools, not all, but in most schools. And then they go to counseling, and they fail in counseling, because most of the people historically in this country that have gone to counselors have always been female. So our theories are built around females. And when you fail in counseling, then you end up in prison. And I don’t the way I describe it, if you want to look at it, this is pre COVID language, but just you want to talk about COVID being misrepresented in this country. what you were saying we have 5% of the world population, approximately, that lives in the United States, that’s a little bit in that range, that we have 25% of the incarcerated population of the whole world, in this country. And then look into that vast majority of African American and Hispanic particularly. So yeah, we I always say we we have, we have a place to take care of our boys when we don’t take care of them early. But if we’re not if we’re not doing something about them, and I had a I had a male elementary school teacher who was an amazing guy, he was in my class. And I asked him why he took the class because he wasn’t in the addictions program. And he said, Dennis, I’ve got 16 little guys every day in my classroom that need me to know what you’re teaching. And nobody else is talking about this stuff. And I just always remember get this big smile. He said, it’s worth it. He paid his own money took time out of his own life, came to that class for three and a half hours a week for 10 weeks. And but what he said was I got 16 little boys that need this information. And then, years later, I saw him and he told me what he had done differently and how he had like he took all of the deaths out of his last row, said, why would you need a desk to sit still he created yoga balls. And the kids could choose if they wanted a desk or they could have one. But if they wanted to sit on the floor, they could. And if they wanted a yoga ball, he said in my little boys, and he said, I found out if they were sitting behind a desk, and I asked him a question, I would just get this, this kind of stare. But if I had him on a yoga ball and asked him the same question, they would, their brain would be kind of moving. And they would just come out with the answer. Tom, I just remembered. And so I said, you know, this, he’s the one that taught me is not just a theory, it’s possible. And there are people in the world who really care about this stuff. But when you talk about advancing and moving and helping our children, we got to look at all of the elements of definitely economics, definitely race, definitely culture, but also the gender piece has to be built in in both ways. Because we know girls get harmed. I’ve done workshops that for men about treatment programs for male abusers, and the title of my workshop is hurt, man hurt. If you take a boy and he’s injured enough, then this is not an excuse. I always tell people, nothing I’m saying as any kind of an excuse for abhorrent male behavior. But if we want to stop it, we can’t wait until it happens. We got to stop the damage is happening early, you got to stop the damages relating to the addiction, you got to stop the damage is leading to the if you look at the number one cause of death for teenagers in Oregon, today, it is suicide. That’s the number one cause of death. And what most people don’t realize from age 12 on, when we start measuring differential suicide rates 70% or more of the suicide deaths are boys. Girls will have far more attempts. But when a boy does it, it’s a male brain finishes the task and they don’t get themselves out. And that continues all the way through the lifespan. If you get over 80, you’ve got men killing themselves 14 times more than women even even to do that. But just think about that we’re getting we’re talking prevention, we’ve got more kids killing themselves than any other forget COVID or anything else than any other cause of death. But where’s the vaccine for that?
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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