Leadership

A critical component of community outreach is leadership. With two- to three-person teams, we won't have the luxury of doing a lot of following. Michael, always willing to help, volunteered to give the leadership talk. It took a little to convince him he was qualified and had something to say.



Michael's key points:

• Lead from your strengths. Even if you don't think of yourself as a leader, you can be.
• People act on what is meaningful.
• Leaders do their homework.

Finally: "Don't ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive. The world needs people who are alive."

Beginning Interviews

Let's a few of the characters introduced.

Michael
Dear friend. Michael and I know each other well from the "outside" world. He has only a handful of experiences with Stand Up, mostly within the last few weeks. I, however, am quite happy to have him along. He is funny, kind, and pretty much always a good sport. Also un-humiliatable, which is a priceless resource to a retreat leader.




Gabe
Think John Muir, but instead of camping in Yosemite; homeless in Phoenix. While Muir wrote wilderness journals, Gabe writes fantasy novels. Ok, he really isn't that much like John Muir, except Gabe once walked the 40 miles from Apache Junction to Phoenix in the middle of the summer in a day and a half. Gabe is one of our guides this weekend.




Dustin (DK)
DK is one of our two caretakers. He watches over the Youth House and keeps it clean, and in return he gets to stay there. Perhaps more importantly, he watches over the volunteers and the youth alike. Fortunately for us, his weekend college class got over last week, which allowed him to come and share his insight with us.




Matt
The youngest member of our retreat. Matt got very excited about the weekend back in August when we first started brainstorming. He is finishing up his senior year in high school and is uncertain about his future as his family plans to move this summer. Matt (and Michael) are the two members of the Pepperspray Guard.




Melissa
Undergraduate critical ethnographer. Melissa is taking a qualitative research class in the Communication department at ASU, and had everything all lined up until her research site turned her away. A few weeks ago, I get a well written email explaining her need to get 20 hours of observation before the end of the semester. I tell her that a 45-hour retreat is a lovely way to rack up the research hours.

Retreat Rules

As we arrived at our first location, we sat down and created some rules. I'm not much of a rule guy, but particularly in a high reliability situation like living out on the streets, I like to have a few solid guidelines. Gets everybody on the same page.

In the spirit of participant leadership, we each contributed at least one rule. The rules we created were:

1.) Be respectful
2.) Participate as much as you can
3.) No drugs or serious horseplay
4.) Buddy system, at least 2 people, 3 late at night
5.) No sex
6.) Limit cell phone use*
7.) Stay positive/no unwarranted whining
8.) Stay aware/try to escape danger before fighting

*A note on cellphones
Something one may not expect, but homeless youth often have cellphones. With no addresses and unreliable internet access, the cellphone is often the only form of communication. Most commonly they buy phones with prepaid minutes instead of service plans. The limited cell phone rules was suggested as a way of bettering the retreat experience, not because homeless never have phones.

Walking

Homeless doesn't always mean car-less. Plenty of people have lived out of their cars. I spent six months as a vehicle-using homeless person. But most of the youth we serve are jobless, and jobless usually means car-less.

So we walk.

Our first trek takes us from the youth house down on McKinley up to the Phoenix Library. It's only about a mile, and in the lovely weather of an Arizonan April evening, the walk is upbeat, fun.

Off We Go

Packed and ready, we head out. As of now, no one knows where they are going. Some of the volunteers and homeless youth have prepared speeches and activities, but they have only a vague sense of the order. While the youth and I collaborated on the sleeping logistics, only one knows where we are actually staying.

Uncertainty is a common theme in the lives of the homeless. Also, retreats feel more like adventures and less like meetings when the participants don't know what is coming next.

A few times during the packing process someone would ask for more details. I like to answer honestly, but I'm also a fan of strategic ambiguity. In short, these smiling wanderers are about to leave for three days, not knowing where they will go, sleep or eat. And remember, they are each carrying only one meal.

Packing Up

I'm Micheal's ride to the youth house. I swing by and pick him up, and on the way we discuss dimensions of leadership. I finagled him into giving the leadership talk a week ago. While I am coordinating this retreat, and I call my self "in charge," I've tried to get other people as involved in the process as possible.

Partly, it's because I can only stand so much of my own voice. I love speaking, and at heart I'm a pedagogue. But with seven talks and easily three times that number of activities and discussions, I want more voices. More people talking means more angles, facets, and interpretations. They call it polyvocality in the biz.



Michael has some good ideas. Not only does his mother teach business folks about the subject, but he is also a young and promising leader himself. I'm pleased.

We get to the youth house. Grab disaster blankets from the basement. Food bags from the outreach room. One of the purposes of this retreat is to give Stand Up For Kids volunteers a small sense of what their services mean to the youth. So we have one foodbag with one meal in it that identical to the kind we hand out on outreach. We have government-issue disaster blankets. The ones the kids hate. Our retreat goers show up slowly. Two volunteer to be carriers of the pepper spray. By 6:00 p.m. we are all there, I have emergency contact info, and we pack up and head out.

Shopping List

I've been on about 30 retreats in my life, probably more. It has been a rate of at least two a year since I was 15, and I am now 29. I've been in some leadership capacity for most, and I've been the coordinator for about 10.

So I've been retreat shopping many times before.

But this is different. For instance, a tried and true technique for youth retreats is candy. If you want to raise the energy level of a group of teens, Twizzlers are your friends. While I'm sure homeless youth enjoy candy as much as their homed counterparts, I feel that feasting on sugar is the wrong way to set the mood.

Other considerations are different. Audio/visual is less of a concern. We don't need or rather shouldn't have an overhead projector. There won't be mood music for activities.

At the same time, there are other needs I've never considered. I've never had to think about our methods of self defense. I'm an ardent pacifist, so I had laid down a no weapons rule from the outset. Obviously no guns and no knives.

One youth asked, "How do you feel about blunt weapons."

"What if I said I preferred no blunt weapons?"

"Then we need pepper spray."

So pepper spray makes the shopping list. The day before the retreat I call a few gun stores whose websites say they sell it, but no luck. They tell me to call sports equipment stores. I do. The only type they have is bear spray. Over the phone I ask the clerk if you can shoot a person with it. "It'd stop a pretty big person!" he says. Upon visiting the store I discover federal regulation prohibits use of animal-formulated spray on humans. This makes sense, though it is now the day of the retreat, and I am really very desperate. I call a friend to brainstorm what to do now. He jokes that it would be easier to get a gun in this state.

As I drive home from failing to procure our sole form of protection, I pass Tempe Firearms and Collectibles. Perfect.

Well-worn black steel weapons lay casually in glass cases. Four people are working, but they are all busy. Gladly, they are very attentive in providing customer service. A mother is buying a rifle for her preteen daughter. A group of young men cluster and point, discussing the merits of a particular piece with a sales associate whose large handgun (small cannon) bulges off of his chest harness.

Eventually I am helped. They have one kind: WHUPASS. Ok. I buy two.

Other shopping is less dramatic.
Eight green disposable cameras.
Twelve 100-sheet notebooks.
One package of mechanical pencils.
First aid kit.