Youth Development

Youth Participation Charter

 

Opening Statement:

 

We, the Good Shepherd Network value all young people and recognise that they are vital in the development of the Good Shepherd Life and Vision into the future.  The Good Shepherd Network aims to empower young people through meaningful participation, recognising and nurturing their strengths, interests and abilities.

 

The Good Shepherd Network invites all young people to embrace the social justice principles that guide us:

  • When any person is oppressed, we are all diminished.
  • When any part of creation is abused or destroyed we are impoverished
  • We are prepared to challenge people, institutions or structures that diminish fullness of life and human dignity.

For the purpose of this charter, Good Shepherd Life and Vision views youth participation as not based simply on age, but on the attributes brought by young individuals to their role

 

If you would like to be involved in any projects that the Life and Vision team is running, please contact Sarah Rose on 613 9205 4132 or email sarah@goodshep.com.au

 
Click here to view the Youth Participation Charter

 

Youth Magazine

 

Audacity 2009/10 Hits the Streets

Good Shepherd Youth Magazine Calls for Action

The third annual edition of Audacity, Good Shepherd’s youth magazine, is now available. The 2009/10 edition was produced by Good Shepherd staff (incollaboration with other justice and youth organisations) for schools, community groups, parishes and individuals to use.

 

Audacity was first published in 2007 to give young people information and to suggest action on justice issues. The full-colour, 24 page booklet challenges readers to be audacious, bold and courageous in making the world a better place. It has inspired young people to have a go on an issue and to help bring about change.

 

The 2009/10 edition of Audacity features stories and actions on chocolate and child labour, trafficking of humans, Fair Trade products, reconciliation, a justice nametag project in the Philippines and saving water. As well, Audacity highlights the amazing justice work being done by some young people, including those involved in the Oaktree Foundation, a youth-run international aid and development organisation and a Fair Trade advocate who is studying Year 12 at Marian College in Ararat.

Audacity also promotes The Trading Circle; a Fair Trade initiative helping empower women to earn the money they need to survive and live with dignity. 

Many secondary schools are now ordering Audacity to be used as a resource in social justice actions. The booklet is available from the Good Shepherd Youth Development office in Abbotsford.

 

Audacity is free. However, for orders of 20 or more, the cost is $1 per copy plus postage and handling. This price is negotiable.

For more information or to order copies, please call us on +61394299313 or at youthdevelopment@goodshep.com.au

Relevant articles

Taken from the Network Gathering 2008

                THE EXPERIENCE OF GOOD SHEPHERD:   by Michael Yore 2008

                                   

Key to Partnership:

Most of us work for or are involved with Good Shepherd organizations that share the mission statement

which begins:

 

     We are Good Shepherd. Our mission is shaped by our

     inheritance of the vision, courage and audacity of

     St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier and the Good Shepherd

     tradition she began.

 

Or, we have strong statements that express the same sentiments in different ways. But, whatever the case, for anyone involved with Good Shepherd in any of its works or different parts, this is the base line. Whether we identify very strongly with Good Shepherd, wanting to pursue further ways of belonging and contributing to the mission or whether we see ourselves as employees who know a little bit about the Founder of  Good Shepherd but do not personally resonate with Good Shepherd beyond doing our job well (both very acceptable positions), the shaping of the work we do by the vision, courage and audacity of St. Mary Euphrasia is the basic commitment necessary by virtue of accepting a role within the Good Shepherd family. We are employed for Good Shepherd mission, whatever the level of our involvement, not just to fill a vacant position.

 

It is our experience of this vision of Mary Euphrasia which provides us with solidarity, mutual enrichment, mutual support, complimentarity of skills and talents and common goals which in turn enhances our capacity to be good shepherdesses and shepherds – searching out the lost and most powerless and beating away the circling wolves of injustice and oppression.

 

     Our experience of Good Shepherd draws us together;

     the strength of our partnership propels us out for

     Mission.

                                                

Today then, is an opportunity for us to reflect together on and perhaps experience more deeply,  the vision, courage and audacity of St. Mary Euphrasia which is our inheritance and which should shape our work.

 

I have been fortunate enough to have visited and stayed at the Good Shepherd Convent in Angers where St. Mary Euphrasia spent most of her life. The night before I left Angers was the eve of Bastille Day and I stood that night at the huge windows of my room and watched the impressive fireworks display to celebrate France’s most famous national holiday. My room was just along the corridor from Mary Euphrasia’s rooms – her office and bedroom. The huge, almost floor to ceiling windows in her office are also striking. It was here at Le Bon Pasteur in Angers that Mary Euphrasia metaphorically looked out of  her windows onto the world around her. What she saw caused her in 1835 to write:

 

     How many people stretch out their arms to us for

     help my daughters! So, let us hastily come to

     their assistance. St. Mary Euphrasia

 

France, with small interludes of stability, had been in political turmoil since the revolution of 1789 and had experienced another bloody revolution in 1830. The Industrial revolution too was beginning to shift the populations of Europe into the cities to work in factories and live, usually, in grinding poverty. Women and girls disproportionately bore the burden of poverty then as, globally, they do now. Those who resorted to prostitution or were victims of rape (often domestic servants with no possible redress against their wealthy masters) or who wandered the streets, often suffering mental illness and, in their vulnerability were easy prey for abuse, were considered by many in society at that time to be flawed by nature and consequently in need of punishment and isolation. Even the most benign view remained patronizingly immune to the role played by the system of that era that oppressed - and maintained an oppressive status quo - and described such women and girls as “fallen” or as “spiritual lepers” in need of our pity.

 

Mary Euphrasia’s intuition in this regard was counter cultural. For her it was loving support not punishment that changed people’s lives and empowered them:

 

     I think it is better not to preach at them; it only wearies

     them. It is better to keep them interested and try to be

     very just and always kind…a cup of sweet milk given

     opportunely to one of our women will have greater effect

     than acts of severity. St. Mary Euphrasia

 

Whilst these things are obvious to us today, they were astonishingly unconventional then as was her admonition never to administer corporal punishment to the girls. She taught her followers that everyone who sought their help and support was to be treated with absolute dignity and to be considered of inestimable value. These views, radically alternative and enlightened for her day, led Mary Euphrasia’s followers to exert much political influence wherever they went, including here in this State of Victoria at the end of the 19th Century, to bring about similarly enlightened legislative reform replacing punitive systems for the poor, especially women, with systems embodying goals of rehabilitation, acquisition of employable skills and other supportive measures.

 

Looking through those huge windows onto a world of turmoil, poverty and suffering, Mary Euphrasia saw also a new surge in   colonial expansionism especially by the British but also by France, Belgium and Holland. Joseph Conrad’s very bleak and depressing novel Heart of Darkness describes the journey by river into the Congo at the height of Belgium’s colonial expansion. The journey is to the very heart of darkness and is Conrad’s analogous parable of the effects of colonialism, bringing repression, disease, and exploitation – overall darkness – to the people of the Congo. He describes the colonial Trading Companies as “whited sepulchers” externally decent businesses, importing and exporting, but in reality corrupt, exploitative and destructive of indigenous cultures.

                       

Again, what seems obvious to us today in Mary Euphrasia’s approach to colonialism was totally out of  step with the prevailing attitude. Writing in 1842 regarding the Sisters going to America, she says:

  

     In America, never let it happen that French foods

     appear on the table. Make yourselves all things to

     all people. If you receive a native American girl do

     not invite her to sleep on a bed and should you be

     invited to eat at the home of a native American, be

     aware that the meal will be served on the floor as

     it is their custom, make yourself comfortable

     eating on the floor. St. Mary Euphrasia

 

They were to adapt to local customs with great respect, to learn local languages and, above all to remember that each person was of more value than a whole world.  It is all but impossible for us today to appreciate how radically out of step such a position was. This was a powerful statement of obstinate contradiction to accepted behaviour and attitudes to indigenous peoples and cultures at the time.

 

We will pause now and just for five minutes reflect on this question:

 

Looking through our window at our world today, what would be one issue we see that requires an innovative, counter cultural voice? What action, in the same spirit as Mary Euphrasia, could we as an entire Network of Good Shepherd people working together in partnership and solidarity realistically take to tackle this issue?

 

In the early 1830s it became obvious to Mary Euphrasia that the structures of the religious congregation or group she had joined were inadequate to carry the expansive and bold vision for the future work of Good Shepherd that she deeply believed was needed everywhere. Her congregation was made up of autonomous, self governing and enclosed convents. She proposed a radically different structure which would bring about a network of interdependent groups exchanging resources and  personnel, sharing the same vision, the same formation and able to go anywhere in the world for the sake of the work. No other group of nuns had ever organized themselves in exactly this way before – one head, Mary Euphrasia, one central point of communication, Le Bon Pasteur in Angers, one shared vision and international.

 

The opposition from within her order and from very influential forces within the Catholic Church was immense – she was slandered, condemned and experienced deep hurt. But she was also driven!

Not stubborn so much as driven. She was convinced that her reform and creation of what became an entirely new body – the Sisters of Charity of the Good Shepherd – was willed from eternity and needed everywhere. This extraordinary dual conviction – that Good Shepherd was willed by God and needed everywhere - let’s face it, two big calls those! – but this conviction became the driving force of her life, shaping her future and urging her on despite the enemies and the obstacles.

 

One thing that stands out in the life of Mary Euphrasia is that she was a disturber of the peace, not just open to change but, more importantly, a driver of change, a creator of new ways, an innovator by nature both on the big canvass, visionary level as well as on the very practical level of looking for funds and being politically astute especially when facing fierce opposition to her agenda for change.

 

Her break with traditional structures that restricted and limited the mission, the Good Shepherd presence in the world, was achieved in the face of bitter and painful opposition, even by close friends. But it was done because of the utter conviction that the mission required it.

 

For her, beyond a shadow of doubt, all structures and all Good Shepherd people were completely at the service of mission, of the Work – not the other way around. No structure no-matter how loved or how long established could ever be allowed to restrict the creation of new and powerful ways of transforming and healing the world through the particular gift or charism of Good Shepherd.

 

Mary Euphrasia was a risk-taker, a prophetic, counter-cultural figure, a creator of new realities, an audacious innovator. She was called bold and audacious because of her courageous abandonment to and obedience to what she would have perceived in her culture and religious tradition as the Spirit of God.

 

Our natural tendency, let us admit it, is to prefer safety, known boundaries, familiar structures, low risk ventures. Change is difficult for us. Maintenance of what we have now rather than boldness and risk for mission is our temptation.

 

But we claim to be: shaped by our inheritance of the vision, courage and audacity of St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier and the Good Shepherd tradition she began.

 

Mary Euphrasia upset comforting structures and pushed the boundaries. Structures were at the service of mission. They would therefore never be unchanging.

 

Again, just for a minute or two, we might pause and reflect on this question:

 

How are we feeling about this description of Mary Euphrasia? Comfortable? Uncomfortable? Why? From what we know of Good Shepherd Australia/New Zealand, is there any particular change to the structure or direction needed to ensure that our mission is effective, bold and audacious? 

 

If St. Mary Euphrasia’s deepest conviction that this work of Good Shepherd is an indispensable means for the transformation of an unjust, poor and confused world, that, as she believed, it was needed everywhere, then in this new century and new millennium, the new structure, I believe, is that of partnership, the sharing, in equality and trust of the Good

                                          

Shepherd mission by all Good Shepherd People, Sisters and non-Sisters, each maintaining their own identity but each passionately committed to ensuring the future of Good Shepherd, each forming and shaping the other, each willing to live the inheritance received from the incredible, charismatic St. Mary Euphrasia – courageous, bold and counter cultural.