Ep. 3: Corey Best | PCA America 2023 National Conference Podcast

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Welcome to the official broadcast of PCAA America's National Conference. I'm Nathan Fink, and I'll be your host for the next four days as we embark on this transformative journey and hear from experts in prevention, and together discover innovative family-focused policies, cutting-edge research programs, and practices that help drive the field toward upstream thinking so every child has the opportunity to grow up safe and nurtured. As Prevent Child Abuse America's first in-person meeting of state chapters and home visiting networks, policy and community partners, and other collaborators since 2019, the 2023 conference offers nearly 90 sessions, three keynote speakers, workshops, symposia, and presentations focusing on effective prevention strategies with nationally recognized experts and leaders. So tune in to hear from professionals, advocates, and innovators in child abuse and neglect prevention, because each day is an opportunity to build foundations for our future. Hello and welcome to the PCA America National Conference Podcast. I'm excited to be here with Corey Best, who, among many other things, is the founder of Mining for Gold, an organization that curates community experiences to shape new thinking within complex systems. Corey, it's great to see you.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Oh man, it's good to be in the same space, right? The last time we talked, we were virtual.

SPEAKER_00 1:34

You know, we're here today at the PCA America's Together for Prevention Conference at which you're presenting. And I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the content that you're presenting, specifically with regards to justice, liberation, and belonging. How do those concepts fit into the work that is prevention?

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Well, you know, I believe that when we think about prevention in a myopic way, we're talking about preventing harms and things and occurrences from happening, people to people, person to person, body to body, parent to child, person to person, interpersonal violence, gun violence, child abuse and neglect, all of those things, which are critically, critically important. And I'll say that it's not always an external approach. So when I think of justice, liberation, and belonging, I look at how we might understand ways of preventing societal abuses, societal neglect that are systemic and institutional in nature. So the content that I will and have presented on thus far takes us on a deeper journey of what we have experienced and have been impacted by in our bodies, right? In our bodies that come from a historical place.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

So these concepts, when we talk about them in on the societal level, we're talking multi-generational efforts to recognize humanity. So how does that work, that is the legacy work, fit in here to advance really our humanity?

SPEAKER_01 3:11

Yeah, so let's unpack uh legacy for a moment, and then I'll go with justice as many of us think of it as a legal concept. I think when we weave the occurrences that have happened, things that we travel with in our body, uh, such as theft of native land, is a brutality and a legacy that we live with, right? Universal forced Christianity is a legacy, the legacy of colonization, the legacy of slavery, the legacy of patriarchy, right? All of those things are unfortunately come from a violent, carceral, punitive approach. And when we think about how justice was embedded into our founding documents, we must first think about who defined what justice is and what and and what justice meant for what people, persons, groups, right? So not to go too far into history, we want uh at mining for gold in community with other people who consider themselves advocates for justice, abolitionists, people in primary, tertiary, secondary prevention, right? It's all bodies because we believe that justice is prevention if we are focused on preventing societal harms that will actually create conditions where people can thrive, live, play, be happy, feel liberated. I believe it's a it's a pretty uh safe hypothesis is that if we prevented some of the sus societal neglects and ills, families will thrive. And so the the meaning of justice that we offer, and I and I say meaning because it's not uh a definition. And so we constantly look for what does something mean that is written in Oxford, right? So we queried at Mining for Gold, we queried 20 some odd agencies across the country that we've worked with since 2020. Uh obviously that was post-George Floyd's lynching. We believe that lynching can be prevented if we focused on institutions and societal change. And so, justice, as we uh invite you to think about it, is one, an acknowledgement, and you said this, an acknowledgement of one's humanness. So, what do I mean by acknowledging and why is that so important to prevention? When we think about abolition of slavery, right? Not abolition of an ongoing process. When we think about abolition of slavery, Nathan, what was one of the first things we had to believe before we could abolish slavery?

SPEAKER_00 5:50

That we had the same humanity.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Yes. That was 246 years, right? Since if we wanted to start at 1619. It took that long for us as a collective to believe that former enslaved African bodies were human beings. That was a pivotal moment to recognize humanness in another. Meaning, I can see my humanity in you as we look at each other right now, right? That's important. It needs to be embodied in order to do the work. Because if I'm only preventing things from happening for certain groups of people, am I seeing all people as humans? And then the the the other part of justice for us that we invite you to embrace is to uh proactively heal systemic harm, meaning acknowledging uh the roles that we play. And while we acknowledge the roles that we play, we are repairing fractured relationships from the past. Those legacies that I talked about have fractured relationships that we have with each other. Joy DeGrue says that the biggest assault of the invention of racism is the assault on the relationships that we have with one another. And while we sort of repair those fractured relationships, we see in our collaborative circles that there can become equity of voice, equity of personhood, moving with the recognition and awareness so that people are seen and able. So this conference is Together for Prevention, right? And people are able to contribute positively to the social impact and its good. Justice is supporting one another to build trust, empathy, and holding ourselves accountable to embodied, embodied anti-racism and justice, not just declared. We can't have prevention without justice, can we? No. With a period. It's virtually impossible for us to continue to think about imagining a world that hasn't been imagined yet without understanding where those legacies fit and how our systems and institutions are even structured based on that myopic view of justice and even in primary prevention as we know it, right? We have to rid ourselves of the way that we punish one another and ourselves. I mean, that's a part of understanding the harm. So are we or have we embraced uh a brand of rigidity that allows us to continue to deem certain groups of people worthy while others are not?

SPEAKER_00 8:26

You mentioned the tremendous amount of courage this takes. And if it takes courage, it also takes integrity.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

Yes. Nathan, this this goes back to a previous conversation that we have. Now, I can think myself to be all the things, right? I am, I I can smile, I can put two fifty cent words together, I can partner with parents, I can train you on some history of race and racism, and I believe that if I am measuring my integrity against my own view of integrity, I win. So, so being uh, you know, having integrity is one, having fullness and wholeness. But I can't be full and whole if I'm only looking through my own lens, right? I have to allow you to let me know and remind me, hey, uh, I felt and experienced your humanness today in this conversation, in this meeting, in this strategy session, right? And it doesn't mean that we have to always be nice. See, getting to a society that's talking about preventing all kinds of harms, it's gonna require us to get to some extreme disagreements based on those legacies so that we can have some discourse about where we might need to go. Because often the audience that that will actually hear this may not even be born yet. And does that mean we stop loving, we stop trying, we stop seeing humanness only because the outcome may not happen in our lifetimes? But what if we're planting new seeds so that future generations begin to experience our legacies? I think that's integrity.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Corey, it has been an absolute pleasure to see you and be in person, be in your presence. Thank you so much for coming and thank you so much for presenting at the PCA National Conference.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Thanks for having me, man. We'll continue this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

And stay tuned for more interviews from the PCA America National Conference podcast.