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"If ever there were one person that is able to conquer the impossible, it is you.”

Last autumn, I was working as a supervisor for five social work graduate students.  We were assigned to a failing public middle school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, arguably one of the toughest and most violent neighborhoods in the country. 

The role of the supervisor in social work, as I grew to better understand, is multi-faceted.  You’re expected to be a teacher, an example of the profession, a soother of fears and provider of expectations for people who frankly, don’t know what the hell they’re doing.  They are often so painfully aware of it, they look to you for reassurance just to get through the day.  In addition to this you are also a boss, which can mean having to get very real with people and call them out when they’re acting like assholes.  And let’s be honest, even in the healthiest of workplaces with the best staff and resources, there is always the occasional dose of people acting like assholes. 

In addition to supervising, I was managing my own workload.  This included gathering monthly statistics to demonstrate whether our interventions were having an impact.  These numbers were reported to foundations and other city agencies, and thusly used to maintain our funding and my salary.  Such a funding structure and subsequent deliverables is hardly atypical of a non-profit social service setting.  And these numbers are practical to help determine if the service you are providing is useful, and actually working.  However, my agency was stretched beyond thin.  Our programs were designed to meet the needs of up to 100 clients within any given school.  That itself is not entirely over-ambitious, if you are staffed with a team of social workers.  But this agency utilized interns as if they were full-time, seasoned social workers.  When the fact is they were unpaid, working 3-days a week, and often doing this type of the work for the first time.

As mentioned earlier, all of this was taking place in Brownsville. For those unfamiliar, here are some good reads to bring you up to speed:

• For context on the community, with photos and personal stories
• A more recent piece exploring racial and class disparity as compared with more privileged neighborhoods
• On a proposed plan for community revitalization and the “resurrection of Brownsville”

Part of getting used to this job, was squashing the anxiety of spending hours in this community every day.  Over the year, I gained tremendous empathy for those who actually live there; and due to a variety of barriers, cannot leave.  Our clients were one of the neediest groups of kids I had ever worked with.  Which is especially hard to stomach when you know how different it is for kids and families who live just a neighborhood or two away.

In our school, of only about 170 kids, there were no white children.  We had a host of students in 8th grade for the third time, gang tags peppering the stairwells, clients with siblings or parents in prison, and the ever-present rumination that someone, a child, may have brought a gun into school that day.  Just earlier this month, about 3 blocks from our school, a toddler was shot and killed in the early evening.  The gunman was aiming for his 22-year old father, reportedly in retaliation for a shooting in 2012.  The housing project where dad and baby lived is the same project where many of my clients lived, and where we did many of our home visits.

Due to the combination of all these factors, it was hard to feel like I was doing a good job.  For the clients or my interns. It became clear why the rate of burnout is so high in the social work field.  It’s easy to feel like you’re not having an impact, when so little progress occurs and so much pain exists. It’s hard to find room for hope or happiness--amidst generational substance abuse, joblessness, families caught in the cycle of homelessness, ongoing coordination with the Administration for Children’s Services, and violence in the community. I felt glad to be there during the day, because I truly didn’t want to imagine what it’s like to be there at night.

My interns, as green grad students, were fortunately optimistic, less jaded than I.  They were hungry to soak-up theory, therapeutic techniques, and engage in deep conversation about the injustices of poverty and the criminal justice system.  They wanted to make it better for our clients and for Brownsville, as a place.  They did make me feel like at least I could do some good, navigating them through this landscape.

And, as green grad students, they were desperately seeking support. They were learning how to maintain strength when facing the suffering, poverty, pain, and mental distress of other people.  They were also learning that when you do this work, it often brings up a lot of your own pain and mental distress.  Sitting in a room hearing about someone else’s suffering can bring old wounds to the surface. And it takes practice to keep your own shit from coming up when social-working.  Some days I found myself comforting crying interns, more than crying clients.  And while I was teaching them how to face their own demons for the therapeutic benefit of the client, I was struggling to keep myself in check.

Needless to say, I was not initially confident in this role. Granted, part of this was due to being immensely over-tasked by the agency I was working for.  And further, as a mildly Type-A, obsessively harsh, self-critical person, I am not easily satisfied with my performance.  I am usually pushing myself harder when I am most in need of break.

I would dart around the school building all day, between meetings with parents or teachers (who were either crying, violently yelling or barely speaking at all), impromptu sessions with mildly psychotic students, cafeteria duty, and weekly supervision with interns (an hour and half per intern, each week).  Somehow, I also found time check emails, sign-off on paperwork, meet with our principal and write reports. I was completely exhausted by 4:30.  At the time, in the midst of this activity, my internal self-talk was endlessly critical.  I was in an ongoing battle with myself of “not good enough.”  

This let up to some degree, as the months rolled on and I got more comfortable with the school, my surroundings, and my interns.  But the nature of the neighborhood meant the intensity of the need never died down.  And while I got better at handling some things, as I got to know our clients better, I was faced almost daily with new and difficult challenges.

In the spring, I came across a job opportunity.  Wildly different, the opening was for the Director of Education at a non-profit, working farm and interpretive museum.  Having a strong desire to get into the field of agriculture, I applied, interviewed and was offered the job in early June.  I now get to blend my experiences in education and social service with my passion for farms, food, and sustainable agriculture.  Our programs serve children from all five boroughs in NYC, introducing them to a working farm, unlike any other place in the city.   It’s been like a dream for me, to be acculturated into these 47 acres and feel so blessed to finally being doing what I love.  I feel very much like I am doing my work, and not just showing up for a job.  Which is a quest I have been after, pretty much since I graduated from college.

It was certainly a boost to my sense of “not good enough”.  But of course, as the brain has tendency to fire in the habitual pathways, my inner critic found her voice.  She (we’ll call her voice A) laid on the guilt trip about my departure from social work, from Brownsville, from a new crop of interns, and from the families I had met and built relationships with over the past 10 months.  

My less-critical inner voice (voice B) told me that in my new work, there would still be a place for my service. And, perhaps as a way to prove this voice A, I made a concerted effort to arrange for my former colleagues to bring the kids from Brownsville to the farm for a field trip in late November.  

Upon discussing the conflict of my inner voices with a friend, he wisely pointed out that I might actually have a greater impact through my work at the farm.  By providing a program to hundreds of kids each day, rather than the mere 50 families I served in Brownsville, I would provide a needed service to a larger audience.  I can now play a role in creating lasting memories of what it’s like to feed a goat, touch the soil, and learn about where our food comes from.  As these new neural pathways have been forming in my brain, I can see how broad the possibilities are for continued service and even social work in some form in my new position. 

About two weeks ago, I reached out to my former interns via email. I sent them some words of encouragement upon beginning their second year of graduate work.  One wrote back (in response to my expressions of doubt at my new challenges):

"If ever there were one person that is able to conquer the impossible, it is you."  

It struck me at first as hyperbolic.  Then upon reflection, I began to feel differently.  I knew that she meant what she said—that after seeing me work my ass off all year sometimes in egregiously tough conditions, she really thought I could do anything!  I found her words to be an important reminder about maintaining self-awareness of the impact we have, and the impressions we leave on others.  It was also a cue to keep my self-talk more positive.  That I need to remember and honor all the things that I am doing.  That despite all the nagging from voice A, my work has an impact.   My intern’s words will serve as my proof!

I won’t be able to stay in touch with all the kids that I worked with last year.  And I am sure that I will lose touch with former interns and colleagues as times wears on, and life gets in the way.  But, it makes me smile to consider how the strength that I began building, in myself, my staff, and my clients, will continue to build.   I think it’s important to be mindful of how far our work spreads beyond the moment, and lays a foundation for how the future unfolds for us, and for others.