I met Hannah and Sam at a deli in Powell Gardens after a morning of hustling around. I thankfully remembered before I left the house that I would need to go to a local music store beforehand to buy an XLR cable to use with my new shotgun microphone, since today would be the first day I’d be recording field audio (my study’s IRB protocol having been approved). So I arrived a little frazzled but grateful to see the co-directors after a time away.
Sam and Hannah were with Naomi, a new facilitator who had given permission for me to observe the “crash course of our facilitator orientation” with a new recruit. Naomi has been a mentor previously. She is a lawyer who works a government job, which she described as “writing quietly all day.” A coworker also works with Tapestry, I believe as a facilitator, and that coworker has recently recruited a new mentor (“a first for Tapestry”). She was dressed conservatively but colorfully: dress, shawl, bright green eyeglasses, which Sam complimented as we walked with her on our way out after the meeting.
Hannah re-introduced me to Naomi after we had finished ordering and joking about the low level of “funkiness” of the funky fusion potato chips I had chosen. Naomi said a team she had served on as a mentor had had a youth leave the area. I asked what that was like, meaning what was it like having a youth leave, but I think she took it to be a more general question and told me about her mentoring experience. This took a little longer than I felt comfortable with and put me on the alert for an occasion to briefly signal why I was here and then to get out of the way of the conversation. She said they had a solid team, but they had lost a mentor and that with two it was hard to schedule. Then the youth left the area so the team disbanded.
Around this time, the food arrived, and I notice that the women have ordered salads and the men have ordered reuben sandwiches (Sam’s vegan, mine not vegan).
They began by asking if Naomi had any questions about being a facilitator. She said she noticed that the youth agreement was longer and the caregiver agreement was shorter—at least in terms of pages, if not words. She was interested in the relationships between the lengths and purposes of these documents: “Do youth see the mentor agreement?” “We tell them about it.”
One of the co-directors adds that more recently than the original writing of the documents they added the points about “I understand mentors have agreed” to do certain things and not to do certain things. They said this change came in last 18 months. Among these was the fact that the mentors are not getting paid. This was not the first time I have heard them appeal to (although here not explicitly retell the story of) the ways that the youth and even maybe even the caregivers don’t really have a schema for adult involvement of non-professionals in the foster system. Hannah: “We explain as much as we can,” in light of this confusion, but “mostly you have to live into it.” And still youth (and, in the conversation here, Naomi’s youth) had questions about “why we kept showing up.”
Regarding bearing “good news”: I love these richly ambiguous moments when Sam or Hannah use language that is meaningfully religious to them, but in a way that may or may not have religious associations for the Tapestry participant. I’m noticing as I revisit this note that, in the volunteer training a few days later, Sam is much more explicit (and often apologetic) about the fact that he uses such language.
Sam helped capture the strangeness of the introductory meetings’ activities: “two strange adults show up, usually of different race and ethnicity, wearing different clothes.” (The clothes of upper middle class white people?) Sam or Hannah also said the youth are also sometimes confused in the intake meeting by the co-directors’ presence: “The caregiver keeps talking about mentors, and then we show up.” One of them said that they have a confusing role, and I think Sam characterized it as “bearers of good news.”
Previously, Stillwater staff had handled the intake procedures for some of their referrals, though Hannah said that if they were still getting Stillwater referrals, they would have started doing the intake themselves. About this time they also discussed how Tapestry adults sometimes get frustrated with how the caregivers behave in light of the content of the caregiver agreement, and Sam explained that the agreement was more a matter of coverage. I believe his point was that this isn’t binding language, but rather guideline language. The pair explained that now they do mentor agreements electronically, in order to give people time to think about them. Then they discuss the agreements in the mentor-only part of the team launch meetings.
Naomi asked about how weekly check-in meetings work. At first Sam thought she was talking about check-ins with mentors, and he said it’s almost exclusively texting, which is the least favorable but most realistic. Hannah asked her to clarify, and indeed she had actually meant check-ins with caregivers. Hannah said when they were first starting out, all facilitator-caregiver conversations happened on the phone. But she said, increasingly, some of them do take place via email or text. Sam suggests that a good rhythm is to call every Thursday at 10 a.m., or whatever works.
Naomi had noticed that the materials warn facilitators against “acting like a social worker,” and she said she doesn’t know enough about what that means to know whether she would be doing it or not. They replied that an ideal facilitator is first a listener, and maybe gives a little counsel when appropriate and if there’s a good facilitator-caregiver relationship. They also mentioned that the phrase “not social workers” is a reminder for the people Tapestry works with that participants “don’t write reports” and aren’t professionals. In the midst of this, they mentioned that a family had recently gotten a visit from Child Protective Services and had asked if the referral had come from Tapestry. (Sam and Hannah said it didn’t, though they later mentioned that the facilitator of one of the groups I’ve been working with recently had to make a different referral call and that it had damaged their relationship with that caregiver.) Hannah summarizes the “social worker” lesson with the phrase “stay in your lane.”
Obviously, family systems language isn’t only or even primarily from the realm of religious leaders. But this literature and approach to group dynamics looms very large in the training of clergy, and this is another moment where I’m reminded I’m in the presence of faith leader colleagues.
The co-directors named that a similar role clarity issue currently facing them is academic support. The mentors aren’t supposed to be tutors to the kids. Similarly, they said, the facilitators aren’t supposed to be therapists to caregivers. One of them says, “You don’t want the family system to collapse or anything,” but the job isn’t to try to fix. They said they do sometimes make use of a resource person at Stillwater, getting on Zoom to discuss things like eating disorders. They said most of the issues that have been treated this way haven’t really required the expert consultation but that the feedback from an expert helps defray anxiety in a way that probably wouldn’t be possible for Sam and Hannah to do. One of them mentions that a “special title” is meaningful here, and I also wonder whether they would consider this good modeling of the instruction to “stay in your lane.”
Sam and Hannah continue that recently they have done some work making referrals for tutors. I ask if they’re nervous about getting into the tutor referral business accidentally. They said in this case it makes sense. The tutor in question grew up in kinship care and “came through Tapestry,” having attended a volunteer training. Naomi noted that it makes sense relationally to try to take tutoring out of the equation. We all agree it’s interesting that in the recent facilitator call that sparked these referrals, three of the four facilitators all named tutoring as an issue, and that it was all fourteen-year-old girls starting high school who needed this academic support.
I don’t think either of them named it explicitly, but it seems to me that the team-based approach is precisely why deepening relationships can be celebrated rather than cautioned against. A team is a check against over-reliance and inappropriate intimacy.
Naomi’s next question was about endings. She asked when it is time to and a Tapestry relationship. She especially tagged that she was confused about a point in the written materials that it might be time to end “when the relationship was deepening.” Hannah and Sam said the training resource Naomi was referring to was from another organization where that guidance was more relevant. Hannah said that “nothing is ever straightforward” and clarified that, generally, deepening relationships were good in the Tapestry context and not a reason to end a relationship.
Sam and Hannah said the organization is open to a variety of ways that mentors might keep in touch. They said it probably wouldn’t happen for folks who just mentor for a little while but that it’s definitely possible for the longer-term relationships, especially through the other mentors. They mentioned that a former mentor had recently showed up at the picnic but that it didn’t go well. Sam reported that the youth said, “You left us.” I believe I had spoken to this former mentor—I definitely spoke to a former mentor—though I didn’t witness the particular exchange in question.
Naomi asks what happens when a mentor bails on an outing. She said she knows that’s a frustrating problem in some groups. She also acknowledges that as a facilitator would be tempted to step in. She said “I want you to tell me not to do that.” They basically agreed, mentioning that right now one facilitator is practically a mentor, and that the problem is that you get more enmeshed and it’s difficult to keep a distance for when things get tricky.
Next came a fascinating characterization that we would circle back to later in the day, when I interviewed Sam and Hannah after their meeting with Naomi. Sam said the youths’ family systems are “full of identified trauma.” He said it started when the child ended up in care, and it continues to “spin” around the system. He said most of us struggle to park our and others’ trauma triggers at the door—that even if visits go well, the trauma is still there. He said facilitators’ job is to “help energy keep flowing,” to come to the facilitator check-ins in order to help move or dissipate the energy to “me and Hannah” or whatever.
This pivot (giving up on the original design of All Tapestry events) strikes me in the moment as a good example of their wanting to embrace that “you are the gift.” work with the They work with the assets—and emotional and logistical availability—their participants can bring.
Here Naomi mentioned that her job is pretty traumatizing, and she says she and her colleagues have strategies for dealing with this stuff, including “kitchen dance parties.” Hannah and Sam said, yes exactly, that’s what a facilitators’ call should accomplish. They said their original plan was that the All Tapestry events would be a place to name highs and lows, summon the energy, dissipate it, etc. They said those gatherings are too tough to pull off.
Returning to a previous line of conversation, Hannah did go on to say that facilitators are more likely to pinch hit in a more planned way during the summer when mentors are traveling. She also mentioned that it’s OK for check-in calls to be a place to vent, be petty, etc. She took out a dry erase marker and draws the relationship schematic on a plastic binder sleeve that has a white piece of paper in it. She said they weren’t using this relational teaching tool when Naomi went through mentor training. She pointed out that there’s no line for F-Y (a significant relationship between the facilitator and the youth) and no line for M-C (between the mentors and the caregiver), although of course mentors do meet caregivers for pickups and facilitators do sometimes meet youth, including at All Tapestry events.
On the other hand, Hannah said mentor-facilitator check-ins are “like seeing your primary care physician.” Sam added, “but it’s a dance,” and sometimes trying to make the logistics work isn’t easy. So the summary of the facilitator role is listening, and then sometimes counsel, along both of the primary relationship lines (with mentors and with caregivers).
Naomi asked about wrap-around meetings, which came up at some point. The co-directors explained that they are meetings between representatives of all the youth’s service providers. They said the meetings don’t happen as often as they wish they did. They added the meetings are valuable to a point, but sometimes major players (therapists, teachers, etc.) don’t show up. Here they mentioned that sometimes they join calls by Sam talking and Hannah driving, which strikes me as an apt illustration of what their day-to-day work is like.
Naomi asked a question about how an Uber driver counts as a second person in a car for child protection purposes. Sam explained it’s because they get insurance through the church and that the “two adults while in private” rule is the practice. But then he shifted and noted that a lawyer has ultimately decided. The co-directors mentioned a lengthy conversation about this and even more so about HopSkipDrive, which Hannah had to explain to me is like Uber for kids. The drivers are background checked and monitored with lots of safety stuff built in. I asked if they use it and they said yes but that it’s incredibly expensive. Still, they said if they have to use it in order to help a team meeting happen they will.
Again, from my notes in their original form: this discussion “just feels like it encapsulates everything that is difficult and inspiring about the group’s work.”
And then they said that their single greatest expense after salary is transportation, which I originally wrote in my notes in all-caps because I found it so surprising and revealing. They talked about how getting the youth to summer camp each year “is the Olympics” for them. They also said they would love to have done a workshop with a local media production nonprofit but that they had to cancel because without help of mentor transportation it would cost them thousands of dollars to get all the youth to the same place on the same day. They also told the story of one mentor who said they might have to stop working with Tapestry because they were spending $50/week on Ubers and apparently didn’t know that the organization would reimburse them. Hannah said she had applied for an Uber nonprofit grant, which would significantly change things for them.
I have a note in here that everyone at the table seems comfortable with silences and in no particular hurry. That seems like a rare experience in our region.
Here again was a moment when sam brought in their faith leader experience. He said, “We’ve dealt with this in church communities.” He said that a lack of information is anxiety-producing and that in congregations anxiety can get toxic. He mentioned that Hannah had just gotten back from a training (he named it, I assume for my benefit) where they suggested a shift to the phrase “less anxious presence” (from the standard “non-anxious”), since we’re all anxious. They gave the example of a facilitator who consistently ramped up the anxiety for her otherwise healthy team. “We talked and modeled,” they said, but eventually the facilitator recognized the issue and pulled out.
Here Sam stressed an “80/20” rule, saying that most facilitator conversations will be ordinary and not noticeably problematic. But he said “every once in a while” there will be a message “that gives you pause.” He said in those moments she would ask, “What’s going on here?” Naomi said she thinks in her mentoring experience the group felt pressured to be fine “until they were really not fine.” About that time, someone said that in those situations the unnamed stuff can spill out when things ramp up. The co-directors engaged in some normalizing here: “It’s three strangers trying to learn to trust each other.” They stressed that the facilitator can model the kind of proactive vulnerability that will often be a part of good check ins. Sam warned that sometimes Naomi is likely to have frustration “with teams of all twenty-year-olds who sometimes will travel and not communicate.” It looked to me that Naomi was a bit surprised to hear that most mentors are twenty-somethings.
They eventually turned to the subject of the group launch, which they said is inevitably awkward (“nature of the beast”). They said often the co-directors will hang out with the facilitators and caregiver(s) while the youth and mentors go on their first activity. They mentioned that it often takes a while for caregivers to understand the organization. “Tapestry’s a different animal,” they said, something offered “for free and not ‘cause a judge said so.”
Again from my notes in their original form: “I feel very confident in saying there’s a pattern here that Hannah is a little more likely to have a handle on the exact logistical details.”
They then somewhat abruptly pivoted to more direct on-boarding issues. They said they could hand her a team that Sam has been facilitating in the absence of a designated facilitator. They mention that’s what they did with Naomi’s coworker. Sam then talked about a mature team with a good grandparent caregiver, but Hannah said they’ve promised that team to somebody else. Sam said the other one has a good grandparent and just a slightly younger team.
About this time I ended up saying a little more about my planned media work with teams. Naomi asked if showing mentors’ faces would be a problem, and I did a riff about how it actually helps me raise important issues in the midst of the work. I talked about the politics of face blurring and its relationship to vulnerable communities and the justice system and that sort of thing. I also said that constraints are a boon to creativity and talked about the different “genres” of face-less youth photos I had observed in Tapestry’s collective practice.
Eventually we wrapped up the meeting and walked out of the deli with Naomi. Sam turned in the direction she started heading and kept talking to her. I asked Hannah if they still have time to talk to me, which she confirmed. They mentioned that it’s funny to be back in their old neighborhood, and I asked if we could go see where they used to be based, at a social services agency run by a different protestant denomination with whom ours frequently collaborates.
When we get to the building Hannah said she had “PTSD about the door.” She said she never knew if someone would be out there. She said she forgot to lock it once and they got a call about someone “cleaning up shit all morning.” We talked about all the construction happening around us as we headed to a nearby retail corridor at Hannah’s suggestion. (I had been thinking we could sit outside, but then I remembered that Hannah is often cold, and it was chilly.)
We found a café and ordered. I asked if I can take care of it, but they wouldn’t let me. Sam said, “When you’re making films or when the church starts paying people well.” We set up with the café’s music speaker behind me, so my mic would pick up less music while they were talking. I first gave an update on what I’d been up to, starting with a report on my first outing with Team Z. Then I started asking some of my pre-prepared interview questions. I followed up with them more than sticking to the little protocol I had written up in preparation. I have included in the margins of the interview transcript some brief written observations I made while listening to the recording shortly after cleaning up the audio.
While we were talking the co-directors were also coordinating about meeting up with someone. Eventually they shared, having previously thought we’d have lots of time, that we needed to break to go hand off some Disney on Ice tickets to someone on a team. I wrote in my notes “I wonder whether I threw them off by volunteering to walk with them to de facto extend the interview.” If so, they seem to have adjusted and certainly didn’t voice any objection.
With the recorder off and us back outside walking, the conversation turned to less official stuff. We talked church politics, etc. At one point, we were talking about something sensitive, and Sam noted that of course we could never record that. But amid the shop talk there were some interesting tidbits I can share:
- “We’re just glad you showed up” – This is what officials said in their early meetings with government and private agencies involved in foster care. They said those groups didn’t care about, or at least weren’t nervous about, their church affiliation. They were just glad for their presence.
- “We wanna bring our youth to see you preach” was something they said they’re surprised to hear from (mostly atheist young adult) mentors. They said they try to distance themselves from formal church rituals in most Tapestry work, but they said it seems safer when they already have a relationship with someone.
- “We’re doing work” – This was how Hannah described the reason why she thinks people trust them.
- “We’ve invited lots of people to the table, but what tables are church people willing to go sit at?” – Perhaps paraphrasing someone, this was Sam’s critique of churches’ frequent stance toward their communities.
- “I’m an atheist—if I were even to think of it, which I don’t” – This was how Sam described their impression of a common, perhaps normative, spiritual orientation among the people they talk to in our region and work with.
After we part ways so Sam and Hannah can hand off their tickets, I headed to the same hotel lobby where the three of us first met. I put on my headphones there, cleaned up and submitted my audio for transcription, and made notes about analytically interesting aspects of our conversation on my way home.
Data collection
- Field notes?: Yes
- Audio recording?: Yes (interview)
- Photographs?: Yes (see above)
Read annotated interview transcript.
Significant observations
- There’s a sort of “flipped classroom” pedagogy involved in this training that it took me quite a while to notice, or at least significantly register. Much of the conversation was driven in an organic way by Naomi’s responses to materials she’d reviewed in advance or by mutually raised and explored questions springing from all three participants’ past experiences with the mentor and facilitator roles.
Interpretive insights
- I can’t emphasize enough how much the brief conversation about logistics, costs, and transportation opened up my understanding of what is possible (and not) for Tapestry and for my research and practice with Tapestry participants. They had mentioned before that mentor-less gatherings of youth were challenging, but I had heard this much more against the backdrop of the relational challenges of doing vulnerable storytelling work with strangers—and the obvious parallels to my pilot study experience. The relational issues may well have been the bigger and more relevant cautionary factor. But I can certainly understand that the co-directors would want to avoid adding a second “Olympian” logistical challenge to the organization’s summer slate.
Implications / reflections
- A tiny methodological note: interviewing two people with a shotgun microphone is quite interesting, I realize right away, because gesturing with the microphone becomes another subtle but quite unambiguous bit of nonverbal communication. For example, if one person has been talking and then there’s a moment of quiet pause, one way to prompt contributions from the other speaker is to gently swing the microphone their way.
- I’ll save the bulk of the analysis of the recorded conversation for the annotated transcript, but it’s worth registering here for emphasis that the interview was every bit the turning point in my study that I hoped it would be. This was the conversation where it became crystal clear that the “faith-adjacent” framing was relevant not only to my understanding of Tapestry’s importance but to the co-directors’ understanding as well. With my researcher hat on, I would want to say that they have richly theorized their organization according to the semiotic possibilities seeded by their professional discourse community. With my pastor’s hat on, I would say they have developed and integrated an intriguing and coherent practical theology.