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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Tags: age, child rights, politics, prejudice, Society & Issues, youth work

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 (more…)

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Tags: volunteering, youth work

If you haven’t already, get yourself over to UK Youth Online and join up! Tim Davies has set it up as a space to share ideas and info for people interested in online work and using online technology with young people.

The aim is to have a get together in London sometime in September but even if you can’t make that its worth joining in with the online discussions. I know Tim has been keen for a long time to try and create some sort of network for people interested in this stuff and the site he’s set up has already kick started some interesting ideas.

There’s also a good discussion about the 4 possible themes that Tims proposed for the get together including a discussion about Youth Work 2.0 (& 3.0! but more on that another time)

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

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: (more…)

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Tags: dyw, innovation, Innovation & Technology, social networks, soft skills, youth work, youth work 2.0

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’?!

(more…)

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Tags: dyw, innovation, social media, soft skills, youth work, youth work 2.0

I think I’ve spent more time in London these past 6 weeks than I have in the previous 10 years. Yesterday I went along with Ana (who’s working on the OnTheUp development) to the Innovation Exchanges Festival of Ideas.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect - the idea I’d submitted over on their website was OnTheUp which we’ve been developing further since the Social Innovation Camp. The ‘Festival’ was held at Amnesty International HQ and basically involved bringing together various people in the young people/youth work world along with potential commissioners and funders, and then encouraging them to talk to each other and see who might be interested in who.

It was good to meet up with David Wilcox again who was busy making more live films streamed from his mobile phone - besides capturing my ‘pitch’ he also got some of my thoughts about this kind of event (below). I’m a big fan of this more open approach to bringing people together and sharing ideas, experiences etc. - for me it has considerably more benefit than the alternative and more traditional conferences that in my opinion are rarely good value for money and usually involve familiar faces preaching familiar messages.

The theme yesterday was supporting ‘excluded young people’ and of course to be doing so in innovative ways given the agenda of the organisers. I think perhaps the audience wasn’t diverse enough to truly (more…)

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Tags: events, innovation, Innovation & Technology, Resources, youth work

Film with the young people from Mullaghmatt Youth House over in Monaghan, Ireland, who take us a on a tour of the local area and interview some local residents about local issues and their feelings about the youth house.

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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? (more…)

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