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 7)

Local organisations
However skilled a worker may be in fostering relationships and whatever rapport they have built with a community, they cannot work in isolation. The context in which the worker operates will also be of great influence. The advantages and disadvantages of being local are reflected at an organisational level.

Larger, perhaps national or statutory, agencies may well have a contract to ‘deliver’ youth work in a particular locality. Often these directives come with targets to achieve or a particular agenda to promote, such as the government targets around getting those young people who are Not in Education, Training or Employment (NEET) into some form of training or vocation (DCSF, 2008).

While the goal of wanting to offer young people opportunities is admirable, in practice it often involves workers operating across a wide geographic area and trying to encourage young people into one of their prescriptive outcomes, rather then seeking to build and foster relationships and belonging. A worker explains the dilemma:

Your motivation is different when you work for a larger organisation that is coming into an area. You care about the people but are there to do a job, not from a position of empathy or local understanding.

Conversely, smaller, locally established organisations are usually developed as a response to a particular need or issue in the community. They may flourish for a short time before finishing, or they may grow and develop new work, becoming a recognised part of the community life. These groups tend to run as local committees or charities, seeking funding to employ workers for the job that they do. They are often ad hoc, with little or no structure or finance. The big advantage of these organisations is that they are run by people who understand the community and its particular needs.

For the worker operating under a local organisation there is the potential of greater scope for creativity and freedom. In a study of local voluntary organisations in the UK, Elsdon et al. (1995: 47) found that there were significant positive benefits of these local groups:

The one which was given priority almost universally, and reported as being of greater importance than the content objective of the organisation, is quite simply growth in confidence, and its ramifications and secondary effects of self-discovery, freedom in forging relationships and undertaking tasks, belief in oneself and in one’s potential as a human being and an agent, and ability to learn and change both in the context of the organisation’s objectives and in others.

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Part 8 will be published next week. Click here for the full series of posts.