Lived Experiences In The Work Place

So this is me… from this picture (or seeing me in person) you would have absolutely no idea of the things I’ve had to endure during my life. Including being criminally exploited from the age of 8yrs old. I have had to fight and work harder than my counterparts due to my background, and have put all of my experiences to good use when helping the young people I have worked with over the years. My reason for this blog is to highlight the discrimination I have faced along the way, due to managers / colleagues not understanding my background. They believe that as they are the ones with the degrees and have done all the training, watched all the documentaries and read all the text books, they are to be seen as the experts. Along I come, from the streets, and start to engage with the hardest to reach young people and build amazing relationships with them and get them to a point where they WANT to receive my support. This is a good thing you’d think, right ? Well I’ve learned that although we all have the same goal, which is to keep our young people safe, a person from my background experiences professional jealousy from those without the same background. I believe that due to this we are spoken to with less respect, treated as though we aren’t good enough to be in the positions we are in. As I said earlier, we all have the same goal so if I go about reaching this goal in a way you can’t, it doesn’t negate from the fact that I am a good practitioner or mean that you’re not. To me, the young people we work with will always come first.

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