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DHS Sponsors Forum On Fatherhood
By Junious Ricardo Stanton
Wednesday, June 4, 2003, Pennsylvania
Convention Center
Wrestling with 7,500 children in foster
care and believing the government should not be in the business
of parenting children, Alba E. Martinez, the Commissioner of the
Philadelphia Department of Human Services (DHS), and a myriad of
City social service agencies, service providers, community
organizers and activists came together for the fourth biennial
resource forum with this year's theme “Fatherhood-Forever
Building, Strengthening and Educating Families.”
This year's focus was on fatherhood,
encouraging men to rethink their roles as fathers, finding ways
to include fathers in the lives of their children, exploring
ways to keep families together, looking at the forces that
negatively impact families and exploring ways to transcend these
forces and keep families together. The all day forum was held on
Wednesday June 4 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center.
The morning session included remarks by
Commissioner Martinez and by Mayor John F. Street, who is
passionate about the important role fathers play in the lives of
their children and about how city government must find ways to
support families. Judge Myrna Field, Administrative Judge of Family Court, spoke
briefly about juvenile males under eighteen, already known to
both the juvenile and domestic relations branches, who have
fathered children.
She quoted statistics that indicate
increasingly more and more youngsters in the juvenile system
come from single-parent families. Bilal Qayyum, President of the
Father's Day Rally Committee, spoke about the need for men to
get involved both with their immediate families and the
community to cut back the violence, the self-destructive
sociopathic behaviors that are tearing our communities apart.
The keynote speaker was author and
University Professor Dr. Michael Eric Dyson. Dyson fused
academia, the social commentary of conscious Hip Hop, and the
fiery oratorical tradition of the Baptist preacher to deliver a
rousing message. Dyson had the intergenerational audience
engrossed and enraptured on his every word as he touched on the
overt and subtle social dynamics that impact males particularly
men of color in this society.
Following the opening session the attendees
went to the workshops and focus groups designed to educate
professionals, community folks and young men about the
challenges of fatherhood particularly the impact of racial
oppression on fatherlessness, the importance of fathers in the
lives of their children, support and visitation initiatives,
panel discussions and presentations centering around issues
pertinent to being a male and an involved active father.
Charles Johnson of DHS was the Planning
Coordinator for this year's forum. He was pleased with the turn
out and favorable responses from the attendees. "Our goal
was to bring together people who service fathers, fathers
themselves, and youth to talk about what the issues and the
barriers to fatherhood were, what types of interventions could
be successful in helping fathers address the needs of children,
and to help fathers realize their own potentialities. We also
want to make agencies aware there needs to be more outreach and
support for fathers. Basically the social service system is
female oriented, our cases are designed to be tracked by the
mother and not by the father. Very often when Social Workers
work with the families they never ask to see or see the father.
There is a whole side of the family that is missing when you
don't see the father."
Explained Johnson. "This forum signals
a change in trends for DHS. We want to look at the whole family.
We want to do more outreach and support the fathers and we will
do more outreach and support the fathers. We don't want to just
reach out to fathers governmentally in a punitive fashion, we
want to reach out to fathers proactively in a way that can make
their lives better and the lives of their families better."
The forum did in fact reach out to youth,
there were numerous adolescent males in attendance at the focus
groups and youth panel discussions. These venues within the
forum allowed young men to participate, share their experiences,
voice their concerns and interact with professionals and
community based groups who are committed to strengthening
families, empowering males and helping to restore communities.
Alexander Groomes attended the whole
conference and was glad he came. During one of the workshops
Groomes shared his experiences dealing with his father and the
issues of drugs in his family. "I think it's good because
all the students here get to learn, the whole thing is about
fathers but it's good they touched on everything else such as
violence and families staying together. This is a good learning
experience for people like myself that have experienced a whole
lot of stuff and to be together with other kids that might not
understand how serious it is, the way I had to understand. That
way they don't have to learn the hard way. Specifically it opens
up our eyes to what's going on about fatherhood. Kids are out
there with no fathers, families are out there with no fathers. I
was fortunate to have one so it wasn't really as rough until I
heard the numbers. I'm glad I came I almost didn't come I had
finals today but I'm glad I came."* * *
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update 9 January
2012
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