Subscribe Feed (RSS)Positive Youth Development
January 30th, 2008 by mas | Filed under Courses & Events, Education & Skills, Society & Issues.I’ve just listened to Tim Davies talking about the presentation he & Sarah Schulman gave based on their research into a Positive Youth Development model. Looking at the slides & listening to Tim took me back years ago to when I first started developing what has now become YoMo.
A question I sometimes get asked is why did I decide to work with young people? The honest answer is I didn’t particularly - my background is in sports - I took a youth development job as temporary work & just kept going - so the more interesting question is why did I keep on going?
I started my work with young people on an estate in Worcester at a typical local youth club - very small attendance and dominated by the local ‘bad’ kids. The club was supported by volunteers and I observed it for a few weeks and then decided to close it down and start afresh. My reasoning for this was that I didn’t think it was right that on an estate of 5000 properties only 13 young people attended the youth club - and I felt that both the young people and volunteers attending it were preventing others from joining through their behaviour and reputation.
So starting afresh I went out to talk to young people in the area and asked them what sort of activities & services they would like. There were various suggestions but the one with most enthusiasm was an idea to set up regular discos. At one of the citywide youth worker meetings I updated everyone on this and was immediately shouted down - “you should be working with the ‘bad’ young people - they’re the ones that need us”, “disco’s aren’t youth work”, “discos will only cause problems” & so on. The bottom line was that nobody would support the idea of setting up discos - including the management committee at the centre I was based at.
I explained this to the young people who had come up with the idea - their response…..”lets do a sponsored cycle and we’ll raise the money ourselves”. So we did - we cycled for a week to Mid Wales and back on bikes borrowed from the police. We went on local radio and we got hundreds of records donated and eventually the local tenants association supported us too. Having bought some basic equipment I began training the young people in how to run discos - not just how to DJ but how to manage events - how to be welcoming, how to market, how to manage budgets, how to organise an evenings entertainment, running the tuck shop, how to look after young children and understand health & safety. Soon we got asked to do private bookings - birthday parties, christenings, weddings etc. We made so much money we didn’t need to submit any grant applications - the money raised, first went on music & equipment, and then it went on supporting other clubs - a girls club, a fishing club, two football clubs, a junior youth club, a drop in cafe, and then next it went on training residentials - things like leadership training.
We got to the point where despite the initial opposition nearly every other youth organisation in the city used our young people to oganise their discos and events - and from a club for 13 people each week we went to a series of clubs attended by over 300 young people each week (including some of those original ‘bad’ kids!!).
It was this experience that kept me going - I learned a huge amount during this time, and most of all I gained confidence in this approach and that there was a better way of doing things than what I was seeing in other aspects of youth work.
Where I did have difficulty was that there came a period when the ’senior’ young people moved on and were replaced by much younger young people (10 - 12 years old). Until then I’d been able to take the main young people on leadership type training courses - but when I tried to find the same for under 16’s it proved impossible - activity breaks yes, but proper training no.
This was how I got involved with the National Communities Resource Centre - they were trying to set up a programme of training in ‘citizenship’ for young people aged 12 - 19. So fast-forward and I took up the job to develop this programme with them. The first thing I did was to change the age group (12 - 19 is dumb - just how different is a 19 year old from a 12 year old?!) - we went with 11-16. Next I convinced them away from ‘issue based’ work. I did some research into American youth development programmes and found they had some good work that backed up very well the work I’d begun back in Worcester - Positive Youth Development!
I took the key concepts of the American programmes - a positive, preventative approach and the idea that helping young people acquire ‘competencies’ in key areas would help them make the successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. From this we came up with our own list of competencies:
- Creativity & expression
- Culture & Diversity
- Organisational Skills
- Leadership
- Appreciating the Environment
- Decision Making & Communication
This is what became the Young Movers programme. Young Movers ran over 7 years - during which we worked primarily with groups of young people from the most ‘disadvantaged’ areas of the UK. On the courses we helped them plan projects that would benefit their local community and eventually we got to a point where young people ran these courses in very much the same way the original discos had been in Worcester. We worked with over 8000 young people, and over 1500 adults. We organised three weeklong national awards events for young people. The programme received £800,000 of funding - we were visited by the Deputy Prime Minister and used as a case study in various Government reports. And of course now we continue to run as an independent organisation made up of the same young people that came through this programme - all this from the original idea of young people running discos!!
This isn’t a personal brag - although I am proud of whats been achieved. Its more that I’d got to a point where I’d pretty much accepted that the work we do is in the minority, and its really good to see some work being done now to say there is another way. And I know from our experiences that this approach if correctly delivered is very powerful - ask the young people involved with us what impact its had on their lives - how many of them have used their experiences to get places at college or university or paid work? - and particularly how many of them have been or were involved for years of their lives despite having to work ridiculous hours and travel hundreds of miles for free?!
I really hope that some serious consideration is given to exploring a positive approach - and not just positive but purposeful. Positive youth development isn’t just about the ‘nice’ things - its about a shift in focus away from problems and issues and on to the potential that all young people have. I’ve no doubt at all that this approach has the most potential of all to make a real difference to young people in society - that is why I stay involved!
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