Miriam: I want to try to grab more out of you about this idea of sort of like, maybe let's say like expectations and impressions like this idea that youth anger is something that you both judge and then also feel in your own life.

Christina:

That’s well put. That’s exactly what I was trying to say. And I was doing a lot of this as I was trying to say it.

It’s interesting because it does, when you react to let’s say, a youth being picked up by the cops based on their race, or where they’re standing, or how they look like, and it relates to how you felt like when you were that age, or right now, in your job, like how I relate. It’s anger. It’s also frustration around not being able to do anything about it, feeling like you’re screaming to the wind and no one’s hearing you.

But there’s always these moments where it works, and you get a phone call from somebody in Alberta who’s trying to start up a sex ed program and says I read this manual that you guys created, and it really, really helped me put together this program, and now look, we’re doing this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Or you sit down with a peer educator and you talk to them about how they facilitated a discussion with somebody who wanted to have an abortion and they helped them like find the resources and. they really feel good about themselves and their friend feels really good about themselves and you're like: okay, so there are, despite all these challenges and all this anger and all this disrespect (Really, what it is, is disrespect in the world). There are good things that are coming out of it. So it's trying to see both sides, and not just focus on the negative.

It’s like anything, right? It sounds like I'm some Buddhist person talking right now. I don’t know. It’s like what gets you through the day? It’s like Marlo always said to me, she’s like, “Think of the YPP.” Just think of the YPP". It 's the same because the YPP (The Young parents Program), survived for 14 years. It started as a pilot project, as someone’s research project, and now, it is full blown like network of young mothers who are peer educators themselves because they influence their peers, and they're doing amazing things, amazing things.

And they had their growing pains, and I think the Sense Project is having growing pains too and is coming into its own and is trying out things and like oh that doesn't fit, that doesn't work, and oh that person doesn’t like me, whatever, I’m not going to like go hide in the corner and cry, like I’m actually going to find ways to like be myself, and so, in a way, it's funny how the Sense Project is like a teenager in many ways.

Yeah, and just in relation to my own work too, is not you know, hiding in the face of challenges, but learning how to cope and how to adapt and how to validate what's strong and to renegotiate what’s weak and…