Hiya - you know I'm a big fan of 'wanky drama stuff' ;-) I found a couple of short film clips hidden among the photos he sent of the sessions too (think he probably pressed the wrong button on the camera by accident!) - will get them up soon.

I'm interested to see how he develops it - in the letters he's sent and from the school involved he's apparently credited it as my idea but its not, its very much his own. He did say right at the start though when asking for our support that HIV awareness was one of the things he felt was most important to be doing and its only right they determine their own priorities so happy to keep supporting as best we can. It would be good to pass on some of your experiences in Zambia to Kondwani and see if he can take some inspiration from them.

Something I think about a lot of this kind of work is that its often not the activities themselves that are important, its the relationships and understanding between people that are doing the activities facilitates. So if in doing practical enjoyable activities Kondwani and other volunteers and people like ourselves are able to build effective relationships with children and young people and through that pass on or help them to develop positive outlooks, aspirations and behaviours thats all to the good, and even better if some of them go on to do likewise.

Hi Khadeem - thats an issue with pretty much all forms of youth participation. Unless the service/organisation is actually dependent on youth involvement there's a risk of tokenism. Towards that if it was recognised that the value of an inspection/report included some dependence on the input of the youth inspection aspect then that could help ensure those aspects were taken seriously and not be either tokenistic or patronising - that's maybe a cultural shift but I think it would be very beneficial for inspectors to have to consider how they support young people to be involved in the inspection process.

On the flip side getting the youth aspect to be taken seriously would depend on having good quality input by young people but I'm sure you don't need any convincing that's possible :-)

Hi Charlotte - funny I've just used it as well despite claiming above I don't! I like to think of myself as somebody who talks in pretty plain language but so much of this terminology is ingrained into how we think, let alone talk! I guess ultimately none of it really matters so long as people understand what is meant, what I dislike though is how much of the jargon becomes misused and quoted by people just because it sounds clever or the right thing to say but they've given no consideration to what it actually means (hence my particular dislike for "empowerment").

Anyway back to writing up how we 'engaged' those children in Malawi ;-) (I'll try to find another word now honest!)

Update: on the lga site they also list alternatives for each of the words:

http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=171...

The alternative to 'empowerment' is 'people power' which reminds me of the little dog in scooby dooby do (and seems a pretty dumb alternative!)

Thats a whole new topic (or several!). When I started running courses for youth groups 9 years ago I biased the costs in favour of groups led by volunteers - partly because they tended to be less well resourced, but also because from my own experience I had a strong belief in the value of local people running youth activities. We met some amazing volunteers - many who did additional volunteering with us on top of stuff they were already doing in their own area. Each year onwards though there was a definite trend of there being less and less volunteer led groups involved with us.

I think there were all sorts of reasons - voluntary groups have had to become much more 'professional' to be sustainable, often now relying on paid staff rather than volunteers, volunteering itself became less attractive with increasing bureaucracy, and very often there became pressure for volunteers to have to gain various forms of 'qualifications' which paradoxically would lead to them taking up paid positions - indeed quite a few of the people who attended courses early on as volunteers became paid staff doing more or less the same thing they were previously doing for free. Obviously for some this is good and if you've set out to try and gain a paid role and achieve it through volunteering and fundraising that should be congratulated, but in some cases what actually happened was the work and wisdom of others created a professional role where really it wasn't required.

In fairness something I learned as we worked with less volunteers and more professionals is that whether somebody is paid and qualified or voluntary and not qualified has very little if anything to do with the quality of the work they do with young people. That comes from genuine interest, dedication, commitment backed up by an interesting personality and having some useful practical skills. Whether these can be taught I don't know, but I guess thats supposed to be the point of insisting people become qualified?! But what does cause a real problem is that the more you rely on paid staff the more dependant you become on external funds and the more likely that activities will die a sudden death if you can't find them. I'd much rather see a skilled workforce designed to support local people to volunteer with young people, than one that assumes working with young people is an exclusive skill - which historically is actually quite a ludicrous notion.

had to borrow my wifes account (deleted mine!) - looks good, nice & simple makes sense. The facebook connect itself could be useful too for linking a blog as a dedicated space to a project too - theres a plugin for wordpress http://www.sociable.es/2008/10/19/facebook-connec...

+ Tim pointed me to Many Eyes:
http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/

which looks like something fun to play with too. Been tied up with a flood of work these past few days but I'll get working on a blog to focus on these discussions now..

Thanks for the insight Chris. Its now 10 years since I worked as a youth worker in a community and things have changed quite a bit since. In that job the roles changed quite a bit over the 3 years I was there but eventually there were 2 staff to run the centre (A Community Worker and a Youth Worker (me)). I had the option of sessional staff but decided instead to use volunteers and senior young people to run the various clubs and projects. I only ran a couple of projects directly myself, plus I would do the residentials. We had clubs or projects running every night of the week, not just at the centre but in a function room at the pub, at the local sports centre, in a nightclub in the city centre plus some other things like the Angling club which obviously was over at a fishing pool. My time was mostly taken up coordinating these, managing the finances and reporting and providing the support (and dealing with baggage) thats part of managing volunteers, plus filling in gaps where needed ande of course a lot of time just chatting with young people, parents and local community committee types & activists. Most of the meetings were in evenings - with the exception of the staff meetings which did used to irritate me that they were in the day when I worked evenings and weekends. That was a 20 hour post. After I Ieft it was made into a fulltime role and they did then take on paid sessional staff - interestingly though the level of activity went down which I believe was due in part that the volunteers resented that some now got paid for things they were prepared to do for free, and partly because the person that took over as youth worker took responsibility for running all the activities and so time was limited by their availability (and willingness to work). That person got to work nice and early at 8am each day (I'm not sure I was ever there at that hour apart from on sleepovers!).

My style of working was more 'managing youth projects and activities' than 'youth working' them - but it provided a nice system for young people to progress to become leaders with prospects for running their own projects - they also had opportunities to do the part time youth work certificate and most of the residentials I took them away on were for leadership type stuff. For the issue based stuff we'd have sexual health and drugs agencies come in to take advantage of the young people that were activities in good numbers. I think it gave a nice sense of community and was very useful for motivating some of the more difficult young people with the threat of things they couldn't do and the potential for things they could do depending on what they'd been up to, and in a way that didn't affect the 'masses'.

I think now we've got to a point where there's little place for volunteers in "youth work". You have to be "qualified" and for those that are qualified specialists its all about targeting very specific young people in very specific places at specific times. I wouldn't want to devalue the work that is done my good people doing this, but I do think its an approach that misses the bigger picture and in doing so causes a great deal of young people to miss out on opportunities that they should have.

Disqus was being a bit quirky with bad links from comments (think their database got confused) so having a trial with Intense Debate (although note the Disqus plugin just got updated!)

A thought I'm having is in defining what youth work is. For example I can see that "relationship building" is hard to evaluate - but then I'd question the value of an approach based only on that, yet I think there are many who would fight strongly that that's pretty much all youth work should be about. Whereas I'd advocate a project based approach to working with young people which is much more measurable for both outputs and outcomes. Even with that though its still true that a lot of good stuff does happen beyond the project and certainly the very expensive research commissioned for the Young Movers programme still didn't capture what the programme achieved with/for young people.

Anyway will get a space up & transfer some of these debates over to it.