A Certification Program for Human Services Professionals
This certification program would be entirely dedicated to decision-making at the Point of Service which is also the moment of initial assessment. This is the moment when that professional makes a determination about YOU. Will you be ignored, forgiven, or punished? Will you gain access to resources or opportunities, or will you be denied? The assessment and interpretation of human intention, behavior, and circumstances is a complicated process and it is an understudied field. There is an opportunity for us to develop scholarship around these assessment moments and there is a way to support stakeholders at multiple levels of use and throughout our communities to engage in the process of doing this. The One Love Symposium is such a process.
The Human Services Professional aspires to be an expert interpreter of human intention, behavior, and circumstances. The benefit of developing this as a certification process is that it's really not limited to education, law enforcement, and health care. In fact it can be argued that if your job deals in any way with human interface, becoming someone who can be a more expert gate keeper in terms of being able to assess need, has the benefit of improving the necessarily targeted and intentional distribution of limited resources that were constantly dealing with in society.
We know that teachers can mis-identify students’ intentions, behaviors, and circumstances. In certain instances, this can result in the school to prison pipeline. The job of the teacher is content delivery. How often have we heard that the school cannot bear the burden of society’s failings. Poverty, abuse, and other social inequities are part of the larger picture of society and we are not close to eliminating such inequities. The same is true of law enforcement. Their job is to restore order in the way that they have been trained to do. They do it best when they are accurate assessors of human intention, behavior, and circumstances. When the EMT comes to help you out of your crisis, and get you quickly triaged and to the hospital, their job is preserving your life. Of the three, they are perhaps the least vulnerable to mistakes in the assessment of human intention, behavior and circumstances, mainly because it's not relevant at that time, but by the time you get to the doctor it becomes quite relevant. Consider the well documented cases of differential health outcomes based on race and class.
What's revealed is a knowledge gap around those decision-making moments. What we need to identify about the Human Services Professional are those key competencies and professional dispositions beyond the definition.The next step in establishing a body of information is asking key stakeholders what skill sets they think is necessary. The reason there has been such a public outcry around unfair treatment in these professions is because EVERYBODY needs these services and the reason why we haven't solved the problem yet is because you can't dump all that training burden on to a profession that has a different objective.
Using the public scholarship model the One Love Symposium will leverage the knowledge of young people and their chosen communities, expressive people (by which I mean artists of various disciplines) and professionals (subject matter specialists) to identify what the Human Services Professional needs to know to be good at the job of human assessment, the accurate interpretation of human intention, behavior, and circumstances.
