This is an in-person event
DESCRIPTION: Using a great many images, this two-part presentation documents the evolution of major human service concepts and practices, from ancient, informal, voluntary, unpaid personal helping forms to the largely commercialized patterns that we see today. Especially, illustrations of human service settings will be used to show what the service patterns and assumptions were in a given era, and how they changed over time.
Day One of the presentation will sketch important early antecedents of current human service patterns, and will show that the history of human services of all types is inextricably intertwined with the history of care for the poor, and of residential services. The evolution of human services into the late Medieval period will be traced, and the impact of the collapse of medieval services due to political, economic, cultural, and other changes in the 16th and 17th centuries will be explained, leading to much segregation and brutalization of the people served.
Day Two of the presentation will explain how services became alienated from their valued cultural roots and analogues, and how service recipients of all kinds began to be interpreted as menaces and treated accordingly. As well, the impact of the materialistic worldview that arose in the 18th century will be presented. At the end of Day Two, many lessons from this historical review will be drawn.
Southern Ontario Training Group, Rygiel Supports for Community Living
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