75% of young people involved in the UK Youth Parliament apparently believe the planet can only survive for another 50 years in its current state. (Taken from a survey held at their ‘annual sitting’.)

We’ve done bits of work with various factions of the UK Youth Parliament but I’ve never been involved with any of their annual sittings - I would expect though that given these are young people in a role to represent the views and concerns of other young people, that when they do meet to discuss such important issues they get the support of experts in the topics they discuss. So presumably when discussing environmental attitudes they were able to grill experts about what those risks are and to ask fundamental questions like is the planet really in danger? or is it that the planet will probably survive but the human race may not, and so on.

Assuming this is the case isn’t it a bit surprising that in the survey the person who apparently the UKYP members feel has the most power to influence young people regarding climate change is………………. David Beckham?!

Now in terms of media influence it may still be understandable to choose a high profile celebrity - but I can’t help but wonder whether theres a responsibility here for young people representing others to be able to take their inspiration from experts in the relevant fields - and to then inform other young people about who those experts are so that they base their decisions/opinions on credible information, not media puppets.

You can see more about the UKYP Annual Sitting on their website

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Tags: campaign, environment, Participation & Citizenship, policy, politics, Society & Issues, youth work

I’ve been using delicious for a long time for storing bookmarks (web addresses), mostly because of how well it integrates with the firefox browser.

Well here’s an alternative social bookmarking service - Reddit. With Reddit you can now create your own ’sub sites’, so I set one up for Youth Participation/Citizenship which you can see here.

So far its a bit top heavy with stuff from this blog but theres a few other links too. If anyone can be bothered you can sign up to Reddit too and then add your own links to the site. To do so Reddit offers some buttons that you can add to your browser so that when you visit a site you think is relevant all you need to do is click it!

Please do feel free to add all the relevant content from your own blogs and sites and anything else you find along your travels!

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Tags: Resources, social media, youth work, youth work 2.0

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?

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Tags: campaign, youth work

(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 (more…)

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Tags: child rights, youth work

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?

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Tags: innovation, Innovation & Technology, policy, social networks, Society & Issues, youth work, youth work 2.0

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.

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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 (more…)

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Tristan Donovan wrote an interesting Opinion piece that you can see here. His original question was

• Are we getting older sooner or staying young longer?

I thought it interesting anyway because I think maybe the answer is both. Often I’ve wondered whether children “grow up” too fast, I also sometimes question if youth work may even hasten this with so much emphasis on ‘empowering’ young people.

In the rest of Tristans article he discusses how proposed restrictions on under 18 year olds seemingly contradict the campaign for 16 year olds to be able to vote. I’d agree that it would…… that is if you agree with the premise that you should reach a magic age and then all the entitlements of adulthood are yours. On the otherhand you may argue there should be a gradual transition of responsibilities - in fact perhaps there already is if you look at this post showing the different ages at which young people gain legal responsibilities.

Although reading through that list doesn’t give the impression that it was planned to be a system to support young people to take on increasing responsibility until becoming a ‘full adult’ - instead it looks more like people randomly deciding ages they think may be suitable for certain things.

Arguably this is also whats happening right now - on the one hand theres the camp that argue young people should be able to vote at 16, and then there are those saying 18 year olds are not yet capable of drinking alcohol responsibly or purchasing knives etc. Nobody though seems to have taken an overall view and said what is the best process through which we can support young people to take on all of these responsibilities, and in what order or priority are they handed over to them?

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