(Guest Post by Hugh Doyle, outgoing Project Manager for the Youth Participation Project (YPP) in Donegal)

In the early days of YPP, from our base in a small office in Drumany Old Church in Letterkenny, Bill Vaughan and I, ably supported by Project Coordinator Gerry McGeady, set about our task of “Capacity-Building for participation the population of young people and service providers in the North West” or so the Action Plan said anyway!  We first set about developing reference groups of young people all across the North West.  In this way young people looked at specific themes (mainly Alcohol and Drugs, Mental Health and Sexual Health) and presented their ideas to service planners, managers and providers at our first conference, Right to Be, in the Everglades Hotel in Derry on the 2nd December 2005.  The planners and managers were highly impressed with the insight and knowledge those young people showed that day and why wouldn’t young people show Continue Reading »

I haven’t read the magazine itself yet as our local post isn’t the most efficient service, but I see an opinion piece I wrote for Children & Young People Now has been published this week - you can read it online here.

The basic points I was making are:

• Online technology isn’t just about doing cool stuff with young people - its something youth workers should be looking to use as part of their own productivity
• There’s massive potential for collaboration within the sector - however this requires more people to make better use of online tools and of course to seek to interact

A few months back DK at Mediasnackers, Tim Davies and myself started planning a campaign to find the first statutory youth work blogger. As it turned out the campaign wouldn’t be needed as DK had already done enough on his travels to inspire Hilary Mason to give blogging a go - something she continues to do very well.

Theres been a few more pop up since, and assuming this continues to grow, there should soon be a youth work blogging wilderness, albeit a sparce one. This is great to see and very interesting to read about peoples experiences and opinions, but I think we also need people to start looking to go a stage further.

I’m not sure if ‘Open Source‘ is a term yet understood by the average person - assuming its not, a basic description for ‘Open Source Software’ would be that (often very skilled) people decide to create a piece of software, and rather than sell it in the conventional sense, they put it online for free. They don’t just make the software free, they make the code available too. This means that other people around the world can play with the code themselves and adapt it for their own needs. What often happens is that people who make improvements to the code share their additions and then begin to collaborate with others doing the same. This then expands further with people then developing ‘add-ons’ or new versions and so on.

People do this for free - or in terms more familiar to youth work - they volunteer their time to contribute towards an online community.

So what would it take to get a version of ‘Open Source Youth Work’? Quite a lot I expect Continue Reading »

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 »

I wrote a chapter in our book called the ‘Pathway to Participation’. I’ve adapted it and attached a pdf here. I started thinking about this again after seeing an appeal for young people to sit on an ‘advisory group’, and this got me thinking about the difference between a developmental approach to involving young people progressively and just recruiting young people ’straight to the top’.

Next month we’re doing some work with Streetgames. They’re exploring how to support young people from taking part in sporting activities with them through to becoming involved at a strategic level with the organisation. When we originally met up to discuss this, we spoke about the pathway and the need to have it in place prior to our training with them. The ‘pathway’ is the ‘journey’ that young people are able to take through the organisation - its how young people are able to progress from their initial involvement and then on to whatever positions of responsibility/involvement the organisation can offer them.

To use a sports organisation as an example this might be something like: Continue Reading »

At our meeting this weekend one of the things we looked at was our working practices as an organisation - including how we’re structured and how our members (including young people) can participate in our ‘governance’.

YoMo has a Board of Directors and a committee. The Committee has become a charity (The YoMo Foundation). The Charity and the Company Continue Reading »