The following is an excerpt from my opening chapter in Journeying Together. Growing youth work and youth workers in local communities. The book is a 144 page collection of writings looking at the practical issues effecting locally-based youth work. Although it is based around the experiences of The Rank Foundation, it will be of great interest to anyone working with local youth projects and agencies.

You can order a copy from Amazon here.

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Local Youth Work (Part 4)

5. The personality of the worker is vital
The first four characteristics of youth work help to give us a good sense of the nature of youth work. It is focused on young people, they choose to be involved, there is a strong concern for education and welfare, and youth work encourages cooperation and belonging. However, these only really make sense together when appreciated through the fifth characteristic: the youth worker. It is no exaggeration to say that the single most important factor in defining youth work practice rests with the worker.

There is a general expectation in youth work that workers should get on well with, and be liked by, young people. It makes sense. Most of us can think fondly of adults who encouraged or inspired us when we were younger. They may have been a teacher, family friend or youth worker, but they held a certain rapport with us and earned our respect:

At the youth club where I work, we constantly get adults dropping in to ask for the previous club leader. Although he has since retired, he ran the club for over twenty years and was so highly regarded by the young people who attended that they all come back to see him.

The example is not uncommon. There is something about the way these adults accept young people, and the fact that young people choose to be around them. Basil Henriques suggests that the success of any youth club rests ‘upon the personality and ingenuity of the leader’ (Henriques, 1933: 60).

With success dependent on their own character, youth workers face the interesting challenge of working in relaxed and informal ways to attract young people to their activities – or going to the places where young people already are. While equipment and resources may initially draw young people to an activity, their continued involvement rests upon the worker’s ability to engage with the young people.

We were doing a tidy up of the youth centre on a Saturday morning. It was going to be a long and miserable task. Although we’d asked the young people to help us, I wasn’t expecting anyone to turn up. To my surprise, within half an hour, six of our members arrived ready to get stuck in!

In this example, even though there was a potentially difficult and uninspiring task, the young people chose to attend and help the worker. There was no reward or incentive involved. The relationship the worker had developed with the group encouraged both belonging and participation.

We have already seen that youth work places a high value on building relationships, as it encourages association and belonging. When appreciation and trust develop in a relationship, there is a basis for learning – another characteristic of youth work. As Rogers (1967: 305) states, ‘The facilitation of significant learning rests upon certain attitudinal qualities that exist in the personal relationship between facilitator and learner’.

At a basic level, it can be argued that every relationship involves some kind of exchange between people (Goetschius and Tash, 1967: 137). The role of a youth worker is to develop this exchange into something more meaningful that goes beyond everyday contact to become ‘more appreciative of and receptive to the other’s perspective’ (Tiffany, 2001: 95). In this way, the worker is ultimately responsible for facilitating learning through their relationship with young people.

Core values
No two youth workers are the same, so we cannot easily pin down specific character traits or personality types to explain how these people are able to effectively engage and work with young people. Each has their own skills, strengths, ideas, beliefs and methods of working.

Yet, despite the differences, there are some core values that most youth workers embody. These values inform the way they work with young people and the choices they make. They define how they react to problems and how they inspire and encourage others.

Every worker has to make difficult decisions and the outworking of these values can be problematic, as the worker has to balance their own beliefs and values against those of others.

The core values of youth work are notoriously hard to define and often open to debate and interpretation, yet Jeffs and Smith have made an initial starting point. They are; ‘Respect for persons, the promotion of well-being, truth, democracy, fairness and equality’ (Jeffs and Smith, 2005: 35). These values are explored further and exemplified throughout this publication.

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Part 5 will be published next week. Click here for the full series of posts.