My name is Mustafaa Ali and I currently work as a caseworker for youth experiencing homelessness or at risk of running away in the city of Ithaca and throughout Tompkins County. I have resided in Ithaca for almost two decades and I have been actively engaged with the community's youth in various contexts. I have taught courses at Lehman Alternative Community School, worked as a Program Coordinator for seven years at the Southside Community Center, and worked as a Program Instructor and Program Director for ten years at the Academic Plus After School Program at Beverly J. Martin Elementary School. As an anthropologist (BA, MA) and a psychoanalyst-in-formation, I am currently in the process of establishing a private practice in which I engage adolescents and adults in philosophical counseling within a psychoanalytic framework.

In our contemporary world, marked by globalization, children and adolescents are no longer subject to a stable set of ideals, norms, and models. More and more, in cities throughout the Western world, the internal framework of the family involves members from different cultures and civilizations. This phenomenon predominates despite the fact of a shared legal framework and shared linguistic practices that govern the social link. What are the consequences of this situation where no individual child or adolescent can appeal to the universality of norms of which he or she would be the cultural inheritor? There is a certain risk that social life will devolve into so many solitudes mediated by a growing variety of digital tools and ideological explanations that claim to be scientific, but which serve the interests of capital (i.e., profit) rather than those of humanity. Psychoanalysis, in addressing itself to the human beyond the constraints of culture and civilization (e.g., class, race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, gender), looks to respond to this new reality by opening, for the subject child or adolescent, a possibility of articulating (via speech and/or artworks) the stakes of the human to the constraints and openings of the city in the world to come.

Our youth live in an extraordinary era when there is no adequate tradition on which they can base their identity, no frame of meaningful reference that would enable them to lead a life beyond hedonist reproduction. This New World disorder, this gradually emerging world-less civilization exemplary affects the youth who oscillate between the intensity of fully burning out (e.g., sexual enjoyment, drugs, alcohol, violence) and the endeavor to succeed (e.g., study, make a career, earn money) within the existing capitalist order. This brings me to what I consider the main task of my work: to help disaffected youth discern a way out of this deadlock.

 My name is Barbara Wood. For over 30 years I have been actively engaged in the communities of Ithaca and Tompkins County. My children, and now my three grandchildren, have been raised here. In addition, I have had the honor of an enriching professional life that has allowed me to hear and understand the experiences of countless individuals and families. Those stories, along with my own personal challenges, have deepened my compassion and is is now the motivation to actively support this project we are calling “SOFA”.  Cultural changes are happening at an unprecedented pace, and these changes have brought new difficulties and problems for parents, children, and teens. It is my desire to offer support and care to those accessing the resources at SOFA so they can know and feel that they are not alone while facing adversity.