my life's passion

For the past few days I have been enjoying the sights and sounds of Boston. It has been a bit rainy, slightly chilly and at times foggy. But instead of being turned off, I thought it added an appropriate feeling to this quaint, historic city. Every year the grantees of the DOE's Mentoring grant congregate at some location for the Annual Regional training. In my opinion, these are some of the most well put together trainings I have ever been to. I absolutely love these things. It is a time for recharging, gaining new knowledge, and reminding us of why we all do the work that we do. We love our kids!

Our keynote this morning, was a man by the name of Omar Jahwar, founder of Vision Regeneration http://http://www.visionregeneration.org/, a life shaping entity that is designed to "reshape" the lives of inner-city youth. Mr. Jahwar has the most fabulous approach to restructuring communities destroyed by gangs and youth violence. But more importantly, he changes and saves lives. He enlists THEM, the gang leaders (the OGs--I don't know what that means), to initiate the lengthy process of community change...and he has experienced success after success after success. Given my very limited, but real knowledge of gangs, I was absolutely blown away by this man. He was clearly passionate about his work and the youth he serves.

Yesterday we had another inspiring and passionate speaker named Charlie Applestein http://www.charliea.com. Before launching into his amazing pep talk he decided to share another bit of knowledge with us. Being from Boston he felt it his duty to "educate" us on correct Bostonian pronunciation of certain phrases. Instead of ChaRlie, it was Chah-lee; instead of "paRk the caR", it was "pock the caw". Informative, eh? Anyway, his experience was also in dealing with extremely difficult youth...mostly those who suffer from extreme emotional illness due to abuse, unstable relationships, and severe losses. His catch to developing healthy and meaningful relationships with any youth was summed up as this, "No such thing as a bad kid". It's a paradigm shift. It's about reframing. It's about using a strength-based approach. It's about commitment, follow through, endowing these kids with great possibilities. It's about seeing them the way they can be. Like one former client said, "You always treated me better than I am. And now I am better." Charlie also experienced success upon success. He had found his niche...his life passion.

And then there was Craig Bowman from Common Ground Consulting http://commongroundconsulting.org/. Although his session was centered on sustainability, he began by having us introduce ourselves and by then telling the group about one of our passions. It was hard to narrow it down to just one so I said, "my faith and the kids I work with." He then proceeded to connect the dots between passion and tapping into people's passions when searching for resources for sustainability. Very useful, very helpful information. And like the other presenters during the conference, he was visibly passionate about the work that he was doing.

But all this talk of passion and more importantly, the passion that I witnessed first hand, made me really start to think about my life's passions. Am I in the right field? Am I actively pursuing my passions? Does my behavior reflect that passion? Is that passion contagious?

And so, as I leave this conference, I will really try to figure out if I am truly tapping into my passion. I still believe that my greatest passions are my faith, my family, the kids with whom I work...but I will need to reflect upon whether or not those passions are actually evident to both myself and to others. And truthfully, then try to discover other passions that are just waiting, at the surface, to break though.

"There is nothing like a dream to create the future." --Victor Hugo