In social services and leisure programs, funding cuts change the way that service organizations like Head & Hands, the Atwater Library and the CLC at James Lyng are able to respond to the need for meaningful social interventions in their communities. These organizations have identified that funding for youth development usually targets specific social problems, and is limited term, requiring that community organizations develop projects and programs that meet funding agencies need for short–term outcomes and timelines. This in turn, creates a new kind of worker - the skilled (though probably non-professional) temporary community worker.

“As I’m there and realizing that the mandate is to target inner-city youth and empower them, I realize that one of the only reasons why I was able to be the instruction was because of my class. I wasn’t working that much; I was getting support from my family at the time, and I had a lot of time that I could invest into the project, that was needed to make it successful.” (Lynn: “No Money, More Problems”)

These workers are typically young, middle-class and childless. Without a great deal of pressure on their material resources, they are able to live from contract to contract, or hold down jobs in several places at once. Being in relatively good health, they have little concern with benefit programs or making contributions to an RRSP. Many of my interviewees, myself included, are temporary community workers, and on top of their (our?) work mandates also ‘labour’ to make their jobs permanent, and sustainable via fundraising activities. Temporary community workers are primarily young women, drawn to community work out of sense of political vocation. Caring professions are often represented as feminine, so it is not a surprise that under-waged community work should also appear a predominately ‘female’ territory. The middle-class background of many temporary community workers, as Lynn points out, offers a sense of security lacking in the conditions of their labour. Given how race and class are inextricably tied in Anglophone Montreal, the ethnic and gendered make-up of my sample set is not atypical.

The Sense Project working on a video

Baines suggests that due to the ‘assembly-line’ approach of the social work system, unpaid and voluntary labour “ utilized more of the workers professional, interactive caring skills than did their increasingly standardized paid work”(Baines, 2005, para: 22). Youth media projects usually operate as cash-strapped add-ons to a given organizations mandate – and thus are apart from the requirements of an assembly-line system. This freedom means that “temporary” social workers associated with youth media projects are able to devote their time and energy to fields of endeavor that give them ample opportunity to use their empathic skills and build relationships that revolve around social transformation – often from a position of material safety relative to the participants in their projects. This willingness to continue working in ‘meaningful’ employment no matter how temporary, underpaid, and insecure is tied to age and social position, as many of my interviewees considered the circumstances of their work to be untenable in the long term. Thus these ‘careers’ can resemble stepping stones, though as social programs are increasingly threatened in a market economy, it unclear where the rocky path of temporary community work will lead.