There were some good discussions over on UKYouthOnline about developing policies for interacting with young people online.

In particular there was a debate about whether youth workers should separate their personal social networking profiles from their ‘professional’ persona’s (and profiles) that they use to interact with young people professionally.

Well over in the US theres a proposed law to make it illegal for school teachers to have ’social networking friendships’ with children and young people. CNN has an article online including an interview with a teacher who does use a Myspace page to allow students to contact him.

The proposed law has come about following fears that ’social networking sites are breeding innapropriate behaviour between teachers and students’. In the CNN article an Education Lawyer says that having clear professional boundaries are important “You’ve got to establish it from Day One and say, ‘I’m not your buddy, I’m not your friend, I’m just your teacher.”

I wrote something similar in ‘What Makes a Good Paid Youth Worker‘ - that relationships with young people need to be on the basis of what you can professionally offer them - not just ‘friendship’. But of course social networking is all about how many ‘friends’ you have and now that services offer to show how many of your email contacts are registered with them it means that any person you’ve had email contact is likely to easily find your profile.

Of course you don’t have to accept ‘friend requests’ providing you can get over the fear of causing offence! I’m not quite sure what I think about this yet - on the one hand some good clear rigid guidelines could work fairly well, on the other hand there is a point that its similar to saying if you work in an area you can’t also be seen to socialise there.

Actually that reminds me of a situation I found myself in when I first started as a ‘Youth Development Worker’ on an estate. I also played for the local cricket club and through one of the players I became friends with somebody who invited me for a meet up in their house which happened to be on the estate where I worked. I did attend, only to discover it was his parents house and his little sister was a regular member of one of my youth clubs - she wasn’t there but I did wonder about how weird it would have been if she’d been at home while I was getting drunk with her brother and his mates in the back garden!

For youth and community work the boundaries will always be a bit more blurred than teaching but it will be interesting to follow what happens in Missouri and whether or not it has any impact over here.

I finally got round to submitting our response to the DCSF Consultation on ‘Youth Sector Support‘ and one of the questions raised an issue I’d considered a while back.

Participation is the current ‘in term’ (although I see ‘empowerment’ is making a come back!). But while I think youth participation is in principle a good thing, its not the be all & end all. I also think too much apparent participation is in fact minority participation - it uses a model of representation rather than effectively allowing any young person to be able to participate in an organisation or service. Representation is very useful - but only if those doing the representing are effectively representing the views and needs of others (and often this is questionable).

So how do you broaden participation so that young people who are not ‘represented’ are able to have an input? Continue Reading »

Its a constant challenge for people working with young people in projects and activities to be able to prove the value of what they’re doing - especially if many of those benefits are in so called ’soft skills’ - things like confidence, working relationships, being organised etc.

They’re called soft skills but they’re towards the top of the list of things that employers look for, so they’re very important. We had the same issue for our Apprentice Trainer Programme - if you speak to the young people involved with that many of them will talk about all sorts of benefits the experience had for them - but we never had any way of measuring this - even the research that was done on the programme doesn’t really give a true picture.

A main feature of our Prospective resource is the process of linking up young peoples skills and interests with other peoples needs. Prospective ends with young people identifying various’ actions’ they would like to take, and these Actions can be group or individual actions. The Outline resource includes ‘Personal Record Cards’ - these are things we developed because we recognised that many youth workers weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities available during a project to help young people develop personally - there was a tendency to just see it as a ‘group thing’. So we developed Personal Record Cards to allow young people to give themselves Continue Reading »

The final version of the independent research report undertaken on the Young Movers programme is now available (copy attached at the bottom). I wrote a brief history of the Young Movers programme in a blog a few days ago.

The research was undertaken by the Institute of Political and Economical Governance and is in two parts - an overall report and a more focussed report on the Apprentice Trainer programme that trained up the young people who delivered the training on courses. YoMo evolved from the Young Movers programme and many of the young people that were Apprentice Trainers are still involved with us.

I’ve picked out some of the bits that I think are particularly interesting. Firstly that young people are willing to participate in their communities…..

“There was a willingness to get involved with community problems, just under nine in ten said they would like to be more
involved”

However they do view adults as a barrier to their potential participation:

“This included a lack of recognition of young volunteers, and a lack of opportunities to get involved locally. They also pointed to hostility and criticism of young people from adults. They felt that adults do not take young people’s views seriously, and did not genuinely listen. This was seen as a de-motivator for youth involvement, offering mixed messages to young people.”

And yet this is despite that young people feel Continue Reading »

At 4:15am earlier last week we finally finished the film from our last visit to Malawi (in December & January). Originally we’d planned to have this done by Easter!! But a year of complete madness meant that never happened but finally its in a viewable format.

We showed it at the Practical Ideas for Participation event on Thursday evening - if you didn’t attend or fancy seeing it again here it is. Continue Reading »

Over the past few years whilst being involved with youth work/participation/training, myself and a lot of others have come to notice and question- ADULTS. Its often quite rare that we come across an adult who is supporting their group properly and effectively- I know this because a lot of time is spent complaining about the ones who don’t! Sometimes, the adults create more of a problem than the young people. Just recently I have found adults we are working with to be very challenging towards me/us- in a way where it’s not questions to find out information etc- questions to catch you out or Continue Reading »

If you’ve read the other blogs you’ll probably have picked up that Kirsty had a bad experience recently with a couple of Youth Workers who were (supposed to be) supporting a group of young men on a course. Its extremely frustrating for us when we come across poor Youth Workers - we can do the best training in the world but if you see that the young people won’t be supported when they get back home it makes everything a bit pointless - imagine how frustrating that is if you’re a volunteer thats worked your socks off delivering training…… and the paid workers supporting the young people can’t be bothered!!!

Anyway to redress the balance I thought I’d write something on what makes a good Youth Worker (or any other similar role!). Continue Reading »

The last time I wrote a blog, I believe the title was “Pigeons and Ears” exploring the issue of these earless creatures, later discovering they have holes in their heads, as do most birds, also receiving vibrations from their bottoms?! Hopefully my interests, knowledge and general ideas have progressed since then…

It was interesting reading mas’s blog about judging people after working on a course this weekend. I was warned to expect anyone, anything! But when six 20 year old lads with diamonds in their ears from lewisham turned up, I did feel rather nervous! Continue Reading »