“Children’s Corps fit with my journey and mission because its very existence is predicated on acknowledging and reforming the dysfunction inherent to the carceral system of child welfare,” Kaya Ceci, Children’s Corps Class of 2013, said recently.
While Kaya’s interest in understanding how oppression impacts individuals on psychological, physiological and spiritual levels was already leading her into the direction of the human and social services field, she notes that Children’s Corps provided essential support and encouragement to start this journey shortly after graduating with a degree in Psychology and Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University. Her studies of the historical legacies of colonialism in the Americas mixed with her personal experience of poverty throughout childhood, primed her to understand the importance of awakening one’s critical consciousness to disrupt the harmful process of internalization that often stems from experiencing oppression. Children’s Corps gave her a direct path to attempt to do so through the formation of countless therapeutic relationships with youth and families in New York City and now Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Upon moving to New York City, Kaya began work as a bilingual preventive case planner in Harlem and Washington Heights. After two and a half years in this role at her placement agency Graham Windham, she eventually transitioned into the role of youth development coach, working with systems involved youth one-on-one and in group settings where she led college access and workforce development programming steeped in trauma informed, social emotional learning and restorative justice principles. While continuing to work full time, Kaya completed her Masters in Social Work from Columbia University and had the liberty of designing her own field placement with her long-standing organization and the Manhattan District Attorneys office.
Whether working with whole family systems in preventive services, young adults transitioning out of foster care, or frontline reentry practitioners in her current role as a nonprofit program manager, Kaya has committed herself to a life of building authentic, transformative connections within community.
In reflecting on what she has learned about the art of relationship building, Kaya notes that the process starts with “large doses of humility” and constant recognition that those you’re partnering with are “the experts of their own experience.” With young people, this means expressing confidence and belief in their innate abilities and respecting their right to self determination. This is especially crucial given that this right is denied to them from the moment they enter the child welfare or juvenile justice systems, and sometimes long before.
“I like to frame it as holding up a mirror to reflect back to them the way I see them- so that over time all they can see is the possibilities, strengths, and insights that they hold just by virtue of their life experiences,” she shares.
Getting to a place where a young person buys into this reflection often requires weeks, months, even years of responsive and unrelenting trust building. She finds that it is essential to be upfront, honest, consistent, and to go above and beyond where possible to show that you care. This can mean countless different things, depending on the person: everything from showing up to parent teacher conferences, to accompanying them to court appointments, attending their school plays, to introducing them to new experiences and foods on every birthday.
“It’s not about just reaching out when you need something from them because they’ve come to expect transactional relationships. This is why it’s so important to set yourself apart from their previous harmful experiences in the system” Kaya says, adding that it is key to “show that this relationship you’re mutually forming is not transactional but rather transformational.”
In child welfare, this usually means looking beyond a youth’s case plan. For instance, when one young person that Kaya worked with was having trouble managing his anxiety at school, Kaya poured her energy into looking for creative solutions. She remembered that the young man had always been interested in martial arts, so she found an organization that provided scholarships for extracurriculars and carefully crafted a letter of recommendation for him. He ended up getting a scholarship for two years of classes at a gym that has now become his community. Not only did this strengthen their bond, but it also had a ripple effect in other areas of his life, including school attendance and engagement.
For Kaya, this was a lesson in the power of listening between the lines to what is important to a young person and letting that drive the way forward in her work with them- tailoring dynamic responses to their subjective needs.
“It’s all about those little big things,” she remarks.
At other times, the best way of showing a young person you care is to speak candidly when their intentions and actions don’t align and to hold them accountable when they make mistakes. Although these conversations can be tough, this investment of time and energy in helping them to see lessons learned sends a message to young people that you believe in them and their potential for growth despite any setback. In their own way, these moments of “accountability mixed with unconditional positive regard” is what she says serve as the foundation of what can be considered a transformative relationship.
For Kaya, these sustained connections with youth and families are essential to changing the larger system, which often judges and condemns people based on the hardest moments of their lives, rather than their resilience. In her words, “Trauma doesn’t have to be deterministic, we can learn ways to integrate it and carry it in such a way that it doesn’t limit and define what is possible.”
Throughout the joyful moments and the challenging conversations, Kaya found motivation from knowing that she was a part of a larger push to shape relationships, programs, and systems to be more compassionate, strengths-based and people-centered.
“I’ll always have this fire burning in me to do this work in some capacity, and knowing that I have my Children’s Corps community in the background cheering me on helps sustain the flame when it feels like I’m pushing against a mountain,” she reflects. “It honestly feels like they still are, even though now it was so many years ago.”
Ultimately, she carries the spirit of her time at Children’s Corps into her current position as a Reentry Program Manager for a national workforce development non-profit in Philadelphia, putting to use her knowledge of frontline dynamics and needs and continuously “working against the grains of the system to make space for little life transformations along the way.”
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