Paper short abstract:

Canadian austerity measures have sought to calibrate risk and to “responsibilize” non-profit organizations. Growing transparency requirements are having a deleterious impact on the provision of programs and services by non-profits which offer youth outreach programming.

Paper long abstract:

The Wahkohtowin Strengthening Families Program is a five-year community-based collaborative research partnership between an applied anthropologist and four non-profit community agencies serving Winnipeg's central and north end communities. Wahkotowin-SFP is a curriculum-based family outreach program that engages youth aged 11 to 17 years, who are facing systemic challenges and barriers, and who hail from Indigenous, new immigrant, refugee and/or economically impoverished communities. In addition to illuminating an understanding of the boundary work that is in play when the constructs of "at-risk youth," "resilience," and "recovery" are filtered through a number of disciplined discursive configurations, the paper is concerned with the transfer from family, to super-parental or "bio-political," responsibility for youth welfare. In it, I explore the biopolitical orientation of family services, and investigate the logic behind new forms of public management, such as the shipping, receiving and warehousing of youths in Winnipeg hotels. I am concerned with the ways this logic contributes to risk, destabilizing the already precarious positionality of marginal subjects.