One Love Symposium: Our Goal Clearly Defined
The goal of these gatherings is to bring together interested community members and subject area specialists to consider the necessary skills and knowledge for really good public service work. We would like to use this information as the foundation for a professional learning curriculum and certification opportunity called the Human Services Professional.
This certification would be useful for anyone for whom one on one communication is a big part of their job because this certification is all about developing a set of best practices for meeting people who are different from you.
This certification has 4 basic informational components -
Best practices in problem-prone professions - Healthcare, Education and law enforcement have much to teach us about dealing with people. We often talk about the problems in these fields, the things they do wrong, but the goal of the One Love Symposium Project is to bring experts from these fields together to discuss what they are doing well and which of these practices we can share with other public service workers
We also want to include a component about the need to be aware of one’s service area - who are you serving - we are calling this regional awareness, but you may have also heard of place-based education which operates from the same foundational idea - knowing who you serve is an essential part of doing high quality public service work.
Another important feature of high quality public service work is being clear about what public service means. Human Services Professionals will have a clearly defined set of shared values about how we treat people and how we meet those who are different from us.
Finally, and perhaps the most important feature of this curriculum is the community-sourced knowledge we have gathered and continue to gather to inform this work - We started with a survey, one we hope everyone will take tonight if you haven’t already [Reference QR codes/links]; We also hope to include focus groups; and most recently, we have been given an opportunity to develop and pilot a Human Services Professional course that we hope to launch through Michigan Works and Washtenaw Community College by Summer term. This course will be co-written and co-taught by the Youth Data Collectors. Your response to our survey will help us build that course.
One question I get asked a lot about this project is “why One Love?” The name expresses a coming together across difference. Just as the goal is unity of public service purpose, we have made coming together across difference the theme of all we do with this project. We have held events in three different districts, our meetings have incorporated multiple ways of examining the problem, our events showcase a variety of performance types and our guests and program supporters represent an expansive collection of expertise, interests and locations. Among our direct supporters we can count 11 Michigan cities (Ann Arbor, Detroit, Ypsilanti, Stockbridge, Dexter, Highland Park, Warren, Milford, Whitmore Lake, Adrian, Saline); 7 states (CA, MA, MI, OH, PA,TX, NY), and 3 countries (USA, Barbados, Turkey). Our small but intentionally diverse group of Youth Data Collectors allowed us opportunities for regular consideration of opposing perspectives. This has given us a lot of practice reminding ourselves of the things we have in common.
This is where universal human values comes in. You can see around the room we have some displays from area students who have written about universal human values. We believe any effective approach to helping people, which is the goal of all public service work, should be grounded in universal human values - and there are actually quite a few of these - for more information on this please check out the world values survey, an international research program started in 1981 at the University of Michigan this project is devoted to the scientific study of values of people around the world.
This group came together in May of 2021 around the idea of building a shared knowledge-base to inform more equitable decision-making for public service workers. In bringing together this group I went to many out of school time programs asking the question, what do public service workers need to know to be good at their jobs?
Through this process I met all but one of the Youth Data Collectors (one was already living with me) and we have been meeting and planning this work since then.
