The Canadian Council of Child and Youth Care Associations (CCCYCA) joins the Child and Youth Care community across Canada in mourning the loss of Jack Phelan—a teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend who played a formative role in the development of Child and Youth Care in Canada.
Jack began his career in community work in 1967 and spent the next 15 years working in a variety of Child and Youth Care positions in the United States and Canada. His years as a practitioner became the foundation for what he would later bring to students, educators, supervisors, and practitioners at MacEwan University and throughout the Canadian CYC community. He retired as Faculty Emeritus from the CYC degree program, but the teaching and mentorship he offered continued to influence the profession long after students left his classroom.
Perhaps Jack’s greatest contribution was helping people understand that becoming a Child and Youth Care practitioner is a developmental process. He recognized that practitioners do not simply acquire a set of skills and become competent overnight. They grow through experience, reflection, supervision, relationships, mistakes, successes, and an increasing ability to understand themselves and the young people with whom they work.
Jack gave students and practitioners a way of understanding that journey.
He helped people recognize the difference between reacting to behaviour and developing the capacity to respond intentionally. He encouraged practitioners to look beneath the immediate situation, to understand the relationship they were building, and to consider how their own development affected the work they were doing. His teaching helped make visible the often difficult transition from being someone who works with children and youth to becoming a Child and Youth Care practitioner who understands the purpose, responsibility, and therapeutic potential of that work.
For students beginning their CYC education, Jack could make the profession feel both understandable and possible. He had a particular gift for taking the uncertainty that comes with learning a new profession and helping students find a path forward. He encouraged them to ask questions, examine their assumptions, learn from their experiences, and develop confidence without losing humility.
For experienced practitioners, Jack offered something equally valuable. He provided language and frameworks for understanding experiences they had already encountered in their practice. He helped practitioners make sense of their relationships with young people, their own responses to challenging situations, and the ways in which their practice could continue to develop. His approach invited practitioners to keep learning rather than seeing professional development as something that ended with graduation.
Jack also understood the importance of supervision in that development. He saw supervision not simply as oversight or accountability, but as an important part of helping practitioners think about their work, understand themselves, and develop greater intentionality. His ideas about the developmental nature of practice and supervision have helped many CYC educators, supervisors, and practitioners understand how to support people as they grow into the profession.
His influence was felt throughout Canadian Child and Youth Care education and practice. The students he taught became practitioners, supervisors, educators, and leaders. The practitioners he mentored carried his ideas into agencies and communities across the country. In this way, Jack’s teaching travelled through the people he helped develop, becoming part of the everyday practice of Child and Youth Care in Canada.
Jack was also a prolific contributor to CYC literature, particularly through CYC-Online and The CYC-Net Press. His books and articles gave students and practitioners accessible ways to think about relational practice, activities, supervision, and the development of the CYC practitioner. While his written work will continue to be an important part of his legacy, it was the conversations around those ideas—the teaching, questioning, explaining, challenging, and encouraging—that made such a lasting difference to so many people.
Those who learned from Jack will also remember the person behind the teaching. He was humble, generous, curious, and wonderfully funny. He could make people laugh while also asking a question that caused them to reconsider how they understood their work. He did not need to position himself as the expert in the room. Instead, he created space for others to think, learn, and find their own understanding.
That may be one of Jack’s most enduring gifts to Child and Youth Care: he helped people become practitioners who could continue to learn.
His legacy is therefore not simply found in a body of knowledge or a collection of publications. It is found in the development of the people he taught. It lives in the practitioner who pauses to reflect before reacting, the supervisor who understands that practitioners are themselves developing, the educator who helps a student make sense of their emerging professional identity, and the CYC professional who recognizes that becoming a practitioner is a lifelong process.
The Canadian Council of Child and Youth Care Associations extends its deepest condolences to Jack’s family, friends, colleagues, former students, and the many practitioners whose lives and careers were shaped by his teaching and mentorship.
We are grateful for the extraordinary contribution Jack made to Child and Youth Care in Canada. He helped generations of people understand not only how to practice, but how to become a Child and Youth Care practitioner.
That is a lasting legacy.
Jack will be deeply missed, but the practitioners he helped develop will continue his work every day—in their relationships with children and youth, in their support of one another, and in the ongoing development of Child and Youth Care in Canada.