I touched on this in a previous post here where I mentioned a campaign a group we worked with about 3 years ago which involved young people lobbying Connexions to open at weekends and during evenings. As far as I’m aware the campaign wasn’t successful in their particular area.

In an article in this months Youth Work Now Michael Bracey wrote that Youth Workers should be prepared to work weekends. Her quotes from a recent Government Report that 91% of people said “it was important that youth facilities were open on Friday and Saturday evening”, compared to just 1% who feel its important they open on a Monday night.

Bracey goes on to mention some of the reasons given for not opening at weekends including that young people are out drinking, a lack of resources and the expense of operating a seven day service, he also suggests there’s another reason - that some Youth Workers just don’t want to work at weekends - claiming that very few will work beyond 5pm on a Friday.

I picked up on this again because of a comment on the CYP Now Forums in response to an article about research by the National Association of Clubs for Young People that youth clubs ‘help curb antisocial behaviour’ (well you’d kind of hope they would wouldn’t you?!) - but that aside, Barry Walsh says in the forum “certainly where I work this could be mentioned as we currently open once a week on a Tuesday… we haven’t ever opened on a Friday.. a day generally regarded as a no go day.. as the perception is that’s when young people are at their most rowdiest… drinking and smoking”.

In the courses we’ve organised over the years theres been more than a few occasions that groups have pulled out because they’ve failed to get staff prepared to work on residentials or at weekends. I was very surprised when we first started to run courses for Youth Workers to find that apparently the best time to run them was midweek - not because they were busy working with young people at weekends, but because they don’t work weekends. Well we ran most of them at weekends anyway because they were ran by young people who were at school during the week and I’m pleased that there were plenty of Youth Workers prepared to attend courses at weekends - though it has to be said attendance by professionally qualified workers was very low (most were in related professions or volunteer workers).

My own thinking when doing youth work was that working very late hours, working at weekends and regularly going on residentials was just the way it was and that was the price I happily paid in return for an interesting job. In return I got paid a mighty salary of £4,600 per annum for 3 years for what was supposed to be a 20 hour a week job (in reality more like 45).

What I’d really like to know is what are Youth Workers doing between the hours of 9am & 5pm, Monday to Friday? Is there really more valuable stuff to do during the day than there is from 7pm - midnight + Saturday & Sunday?

In the last post I wrote about a proposal in the US to make it illegal for school teachers to have ’social networking friendships’ with students. Personally I’ll be surprised if it actually happens and much more surprised if it happened in the UK, but I think most people are in agreement that guidance for people working with young people online is needed.

In the discussions on UKYouthOnline there were suggestions to adapt the guidelines Detached Youth Workers use. This makes good sense as a starting point with obvious similarities of workers ‘reaching out’ into young peoples space.

I think though that online working policies will also need to take into account the unique nature of ‘being virtual’ - an example I gave in the comments in the last post being that its much harder to be clearer about when somebody is actually working when they’re online compared to when you see somebody in person.

An exercise we used to run with new Trainers was that we gave them a variety of scenarios and asked them how they would deal with them. We then related their answers to our Child Protection Policy - the idea being to help them understand the policy and also to understand how to cope with different situations. The twist when we did this was that all the scenarios we used were real - they had actually happened at some time during courses we run.

I was trying to think of some online scenarios that could be used in a similar way and that might help with drawing up some guidelines - so heres my efforts so far…..

Scenarios:

• In an instant messenger conversation a 14 year old young person reveals they are planning to go out later and get drunk
• A young person replies to a blog/forum post and includes their mobile phone number
• The profile picture of a 16 year old female on an instant messenger shows her naked
• A young person comments on photos they have seen on one of the youth workers social network profiles in which the youth worker “is pissed out of their face”
• One of the young people in your ‘friends list’ appears in the news feed requesting that a photo another young person has put up is removed because it shows her underwear - the person who posted the photo refuses and the photo is highlighted on your feed
• A young person contacts you because they are in an online conversation with another young person who is threatening to commit suicide imminently and they don’t know what to do
• A parent complains that a youth worker has been having conversations with their child very late at night online

Some more simply dealt with than others, but all things that have actually happened! I’m sure there are more too and no doubt plenty of other people have had their own experiences. Maybe it would be good to think up some worst case scenarios and from that figure out the things that would need to be in place to protect both young people and workers?

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 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 »

Thanks to a 4 hour delay at Luton Airport I bought myself a lads mag a couple of weeks ago and within was a feature article about a festival organised by V - the volunteering charity for young people (aged 16 - 25) - the ‘article’ was slanted towards showing how funky modern volunteering actually is (Its not about beards & sandals - learn dj’ing etc. & so on) - except that it wasn’t an article by the magazine at all - it was a full page advertisement in one of the biggest selling monthly magazines and I suspect a very expensive one too.

I remember a couple of years ago being shocked when I first saw an advert for Connexions at the Cinema and then later on TV, plus of course plastered all over billboards, buses & the various media. I say shocked because at the time I wondered how much bloody money is being spent on that?! and at a time when I was trying to fundraise for our own youth programme.

Well I felt similar with the V advertisement, except I can perhaps see a better argument for V who are ‘in the business’ of trying to recruit more young people to volunteer. My question though is given the huge amount of costs of using Continue Reading »

Tims stuck a few thoughts down over on the NYA blogs about ‘Youth Work 2.0‘ and Hilary mentions in her blog that they are looking into ideas for a ‘Virtual Connexions Centre‘

I’ve been thinking about the concept too but haven’t yet come up with any ideas as to how an online youth service might actually look. Its easy to see how lots of information can be stuck online and lots of ways to support young people to access that information - whats not so easy though is to think of how a ‘virtual service’ could support young peoples development through their actions ie. not just digesting information but actually motivating and supporting them to do things that are self developmental, and of course being able to record those experiences and developments and attribute them to the online service.

The challenge that really interests me is in the use of the web as a ‘positive/purposeful activity’. Years ago when I started designing training courses for young people it was a challenge to convince people about the use of leisure/recreational activities within training courses and how these could be the most effective medium for getting young people involved in community activities. Looking back now it seems relatively simple but I was thinking about how I’d approached that as a challenge and whether a similar approach could be used here.

So very quickly I drew up some challenges that an online youth service could set out to achieve: Continue Reading »

There are all sorts of discussions recently about the role of Youth Work and the web. Tim has produced his interim report ‘Youth Work & Social Networking‘, back in February a YoungScot report concluded that “Youth groups risk losing out to social networking sites like MySpace unless they rethink how best to attract teenagers” (a pretty dumb perspective in my opinion), and a discussion on the CYP Forums asks if social networking is a threat or an opportunity for Youth Work?

Add to that the ongoing discussions (and events) about how best to support young peoples ‘online safety’ and more positively how to effectively take advantage of the opportunities presented by using social media technologies.

Well all this earlier got me thinking about whether we’ll ever see a ‘virtual youth service’?!

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 »