Conundrum in Current Events

My coordinator has a lot of animosity about the participants in our program. He has a lot of animosity toward them as well. I don’t like it. He’s making it feel like we are at war with our participants. They’re not our enemies.

I get it. They hurt him. He had a nervous breakdown. He let them in and it was a Trojan horse. Now he’s shut them out. He’s shut everyone out. It was hard to connect to him yesterday. He isn’t acting like a monster or anything. He’s just distant. He’s healing, I can respect that he needs space.

Long story short, he is shrinking us. He is shrinking our presence for them. He flipped everything we had built on its head. I’ll try to reason with him but I’m letting him sit on it for the rest of the week. We got signed up for a three-day conference. We got signed up for a round dance on Friday as well. We don’t have the time for any of it but maybe we need a break from our regular programming.

I needed him to reach out to the coordinator of a different program. I did it myself because I sensed his self-sabotage. I want to pitch our program to the families they sponsor. They sponsor families of missing and murdered Indigenous women. We mentor indigenous males ages 8-12. This is a great opportunity for both programs. We were told multiple times that we needed to take in more participants. Since October, we’ve added two. They came to us. One is the brother of a participant and the other is the nephew of someone from a different program. We have an annual report due in April, I want a full house. He wants to slow down. We are actually losing participants. We gained two but lost three. I can’t tell if this is his object permanence or what. He is making no conscious effort to fight for the participants that are slipping away. I have to remind him of their existence. I’m going to have to fight for them myself as well.

We have one kid who had a meltdown at the beginning of the year. My coordinator handled that episode. The kid wanted to go home and quit our program. That’s the story I was told by my coordinator. We let him go. I learned the other week, from my coordinator, that this kid was saying nobody would care if I stopped coming. Nobody cares about me. Like, hello! That changes the narrative! I want to fight to get this kid back! We also have two boys who are now in CFS (Child Family Services). Their family just dissolved and they are in the system. They need us more than ever. I keep having to remind him that they even exist. Then he does nothing. I’ll have to fight for them myself.

I’m going to reach out to the Youth Director, his boss. I need an intervention. What I think we actually need is me in charge. Not that I am going to say that. Me coordinating my coordinator is starting to get old. 90% of what he does, I prompt him to do. He is new in his role, I don’t mind helping him grow into it. This is actually his first big flex. His first boss decision. That we will stop having group programs with our participants and that we will pause taking in new ones. His reasoning is that he wants us to reestablish our relationships with them one-on-one. This is unnecessary, it is just two kids that make group programs challenging. We already agreed that we would ice from group programs and reintroduce them when the time was right. We had an action plan for that.

He agreed that we would sit on it this for the week. We have no choice, really. When he brought it up, I listened to understand. I started to challenge it and make him see the bigger picture but stopped myself. He wasn’t having it. I suggested we review it next week. He pitched it to our part-time coordinator yesterday. He is on board. They created a plan for what that would look like. This might be the first time I don’t get my way. I can support it or report it. Our contribution agreement with our funders stipulates that we do group programming. We have to deliver that.

We are punishing our participants by taking away our program. When he had his meltdown, I cleared our week from regular programming. We had one commitment that we could not avoid. We are to learn a song to showcase at a Round Dance this Friday. He structured the rehearsal days as follows: kids come in, learn the song, then get out. Just one hour. I had to fight to get them in longer. They get one hour to play and eat. Then we rehearse and they get out. One of our participants had a meltdown about it yesterday. My coordinator is being inflexible.

Anyway, that’s my new conundrum. I did not want to get out of bed this morning. It is -40 out there, for starters. I do not want to go to this conference. It is in the way and I am very bitter about it. My coordinator has to learn how to say no. They pushed our expense freeze two months early. For two months, we cannot spend anything while they audit. We have to spend our entire budget by this Saturday. Today is the last day to submit our expense claims but nobody will be in the office so yesterday was that day. I’m cooked. I can’t spend anything. The rest is up to him. We have 27k left to spend and we have no time for it this week. This is what he does. He creates obstacles and then gets overwhelmed. I have to pull us all through with my crisis management skills. It’s a lot of energy. I have major burnout.