Creating Education for Service Providers - Kemesha’s Story
One of our core values at Never Too Late (NTL) is to center the voices of Living Experience in everything we do. We connected with Kemesha to talk about her work creating educational materials for the Service Provider Pilot Training, the importance of permanency and what gives her hope for the future.
This is an excerpt from our 2023 - 2024 Annual Report.
When Kemesha first heard about Never Too Late (NTL) she was working in the social services field. She remembers thinking at the time “This is a wonderful program. Why don’t more people know about this?”
When we started putting together the Service Provider Pilot in 2023, we knew that Lived Expert voices needed to be an integral part of the training. We invited Kemesha, and other Lived Experts to provide feedback on the curriculum and contribute educational presentations to be used in the training.
Identity is a core theme of Kemesha’s work, and she understands how adoptees and those with Living Experience of child protection and permanency journey’s struggle with it, “Because we always have this shield around us as adopted people. We don’t want people to really know who we are, and we don’t really know who we are. So we push back a lot...”
Kemesha lights up when she talks about sharing stories of her late father with her young son, such as when her father took her strawberry picking when she was little, “Those memories…I feel like now I’m passing them on to my son and that’s what brings me joy.” Kemesha’s story highlights the important intergenerational impacts that permanency journeys can have.
All permanency journeys come with many joys and challenges to navigate. One challenging aspect of Kemesha’s journey is being an interracial adoptee, a Black child to white parents. This had a significant impact on the formation of her identity, and her ability to choose who to disclose her adoptee status to as their family’s differing skin colours was an immediate giveaway, “it’s great to love a child, but a child needs more than that, especially when they’re coming from a different cultural background that you can’t teach them about.”
Kemesha encourages every Human and caregiver to a child or young person who has a different culture to put in the work of learning about and maintaining that cultural connection. To incorporate stories about that young person’s culture and to take them to go see their culture by visiting local cultural centers and communities, incorporating cultural foods and even going to countries of origin when possible.
Echoing many Lived Expert voices, Kemesha also talks about the importance, uniqueness and significance of Black hair care, “Coming into a new culture can leave you with feelings of isolation and confusion especially when you are a minority. Looking different makes you question your identity. However, when we understand our culture it helps us to embrace our hair and learn how to care for it, which enhances our self-esteem, and confidence. It allows us to express ourselves in ways that help us create our own perception of identity.”
Being a Lived Expert and working in this field professionally can be uniquely difficult. So, what keeps Kemesha going on the hard days? Beyond using her skills and experience to educate professionals, she also wants others like her to see themselves in a good place in life, “I’m able to let other little Black girls know that what they’re going through, it’s hard and it’s challenging but they’re going to come out of it in a positive way,”
It’s something we see again and again in our work and in our sector, how committed Lived Experts are to impacting the system in such a way that those who come next may have a better experience, “the reward of that work is really being able to reach those young children or youth that feel like no one has heard them,” says Kemesha.
We asked Kemesha what providing feedback and creating education for the Service Provider Training was like for her and she said, “With Never Too Late (NTL), it’s your voice that’s leading the path. It’s your voice that’s leading how they do their work and what their work is based on.”
We could not be more thrilled to have Kemesha’s important message as part of Service Provider Training and look forward to working alongside her and other Lived Experts in the future.
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