The Value Propositions
As I have been working on this project over the last 18 months, the question I get asked most often is, “What is the value proposition?”
Here is the blog post that answers that question:
There are four clear value propositions for the One Love Symposium.
The One Love Symposium is:
A Professional Learning Certification designed to improve service across a variety of professions
A Replicable Framework for Systemic Data Collection across a diverse group of stakeholders
A Community Conversation intended to examine and address a known problem
A Tool to Undermine Systemic Racism by:
Building social capital across a diverse range of professions
Legalizing and legitimizing the assessment of the bearer
A way to raise the social status of certain professions that may also be correlated with certain races and classes of workers.
A Professional Learning Certification
The long-term goal of the One Love Symposium is to create a professional learning certification for the Human Services Professional. The short term goal is to get the State of Michigan to sponsor a conference for the further development of scholarship to support a learning curriculum for the Human Services Professional. We need the content of the curriculum before we can teach it and certify anyone as a Human Services Professional.
The series of events that lead up to and include the Symposium are all directed towards this goal. What makes this unlike any other professional certification is that it is Community-Sourced. This describes the way we have gone about getting a whole lot of different opinions about what the Human Services Professional should be. We started out asking teens, several of whom joined this project as our Youth Data Collectors.
Together, the Youth Data Collectors (who have strong family support for their engagement with this project) and I (a content expert) co-created a survey that asks: What do doctors, teachers, and police officers need to KNOW to be GOOD at their jobs? We worked together to create questions that get at that basic idea. The Youth Data Collectors will be collecting data on that survey through the end of this week.
The plan is to have the data presented by them at our event on September 28th, at the Ann Arbor District Library (downtown branch, multipurpose room) from 11:30am - 1:00pm, but since the event is during school hours, they may have to make a video. This event invites community members to join a public conversation, along with expert training professionals, on the subject of identifying the key competencies and professional dispositions of the Human Services Professional (which is really just a fancy way of saying, “What does a doctor, teacher, or police officer need to KNOW to be GOOD at their job?”). This event has been certified by the state of Michigan to offer both SCECH and CEU credits (state-approved continuing education credits for teachers and social workers).
The One Love Symposium is the final phase in the three-phase community-sourced data collection to support the creation of this professional learning curriculum. During the Symposium, our findings from the first two data collection phases (the teen survey creation and data collection, followed by the library conversation) will be used to inform the discussion questions for a series of deep dive panel discussions, including “The Human Services Professional and Ethics”; and “Measuring Public Opinion”.
In addition to information generated by the panel discussions, the Symposium will also be hosting the winners of the Teen Writing Contest and an exciting selection of integrated arts exhibitions, including: Musical performances; Student films (sponsored by the Ann Arbor Film Festival); and Theatrical performances. All of these contributions will explore the theme of Universal Human Values, because the philosophical underpinning of a curriculum that improves quality at the point of service moment, should be based on universal human values, or as was so eloquently put by one of our Youth Data Collectors, “The Golden Rule”.
When it’s all over, we hope to produce several summary documents:
The One Love Symposium Teen Writing Anthology: Exploring Universal Human Values
The One Love Symposium Soundtrack
Summary Report on The Human Services Professional
These documents will be used as a community-sourced body of evidence examining the opinions of contributing community members about a topic that a lot of people have strong opinions on. They will be presented to state level decision-makers with the goal of improving a widely diverse group of human services professions.
A Replicable Framework for Systematic Data Collection
The process of how this information was collected will be documented and can be used as a reference for others wishing to engage a diverse group of community stakeholders in matters of public policy.
A Community Conversation
Opportunities for public conversation, which are not limited by affiliation, are woven throughout these data collection phases, ultimately culminating in the One Love Symposium, which will dimensionally expand the conversation by including teen writing and integrated arts displays and performances on related topics.
This should be of particular interest in Washtenaw County, as our Prosecutor has recently announced the implementation of a Restorative Justice program. This innovative approach to conflict resolution that circumvents judicial intervention is part of a general approach to communication in human systems called Restorative Practices and there is a lot of research, both formal and anecdotal about how it works. One thing we know is that if Restorative Practices are only implemented in times of conflict, they have a long-term tendency to become performative. The key to sustainable Restorative Justice is to acculturate the social system to community conversation about all kinds of things, not just when there is a problem.
Because community conversations are such an important part of this project, the One Love Symposium and its companion events at the Ann Arbor District Library and the Blue LLama Jazz Club could be opportunities to engage in community conversation about our shared experience. Discussions of what we want our human or public services workers to be able to do and discussions about our shared values are just the type of communication that supports a sustainable Restorative Social Framework.
A Tool to Undermine Systemic Racism
There are several foundational assertions contained in the goal of creating the Human Services Professional Certification:
All human beings, at our root levels, are motivated by common goals. An important result of this is that we all desire to be treated in similar ways. This is one part of the important information that should be part of a human services professional’s decision-making process. Because human services professionals often control resources or deliver rewards and punishments, their ability to evaluate human intention, behavior and circumstances towards high impact decision-making is uniquely important.
The ability to evaluate human intention, behavior, and circumstances is different from other aspects unique to the professional knowledge or skill-sets of a given human services profession, like teacher, doctor, or police officer.
There is a gap in the literature that can be filled by the body of information that would inform the Human Services Professional Certification
Choosing to create this body of information, or learning curriculum, by engaging a wide variety of non-professional and non-academic stakeholders is not only extremely rare in research, but it it also uniquely suited to the topic: All human beings can claim to be experts on how WE want to be treated and which of OUR intentions, behaviors or circumstances are most relevant to a decision made about US.
Given these assertions, the potential Human Services Professional Certification might be a tool to undermine systemic racism because it would be:
An opportunity to build social capital across a wide variety of professions, the ultimate success of which hinges on that professional’s expertise at the Point of Service Moment
A state-recognized professional certification both legalizes and legitimizes the opinion of the bearer, in this case, The Human Services Professional
A way to raise the social status of certain professions that may also be correlated with certain races and classes of workers.
If you have ever been to a conference or a motivational staff meeting where the goal is to develop new scholarship in a given field or simply to share best practices, you have probably been asked to engage in a “Think, Pair, Share” exercise or even just to “Turn to your neighbor and discuss”. In addition to potentially improved practice, these moments of professional fellowship often result in a learning experience that promotes improved relations between colleagues.
The general applicability of a professional goal of Improved Practice at the Point of Service would create an opportunity to build social capital across a wide variety of professions, many of which have been traditionally populated by certain races or classes. Building a common language across such diverse professions creates opportunities for these professionals to get to know one another, potentially finding solidarity in their shared responsibility. These types of interactions, where individuals meet with common purpose, are described in Gordon Allport’s Contact Hypothesis as a way to dismantle biases.
Another way the establishment of the Human Services Professional Certification might be a tool to undermine systemic racism is by legalizing and legitimizing the professional “word” of the bearer. In this way, such professionals might be valuable as expert witnesses in court cases or other circumstances where state-endorsed trust might be meaningful.
Many human services professions (preschool teacher, grocery store clerk, elder care worker, probation officer and others) lack social status. Some human service professions have a lot of social status (artificial intelligence algorithm designer, bank loan officer, real estate agent, brain surgeon). A certification that links all human services professionals based on a shared feature of their labor would have the effect of raising the status of the lower status professionals by linking their expertise with that of higher status professions. There would be no danger of a complementary reverse effect, because all certified Human Services Professionals would be adding to their knowledge base. Improving the status of some human services professionals whose professions may also be correlated with their race and/or class may help dismantle biases against these professions and also potentially against the people in the professions.
These are the value propositions of the One Love Symposium.
It is a Future-Forward Act of Faith in the ability of people to come together and strategize solutions to problems.
