The (late) Breakfast Society - Latest Comments

Re: Preventing Anti-Social Behaviour through Sports & Leisure

tourtrav — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:23:36 -0000

Different point of view from that post. Interesting to say the least.

Re: YoMo in Malawi update

masyomo — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:07:38 -0000

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.

Re: YoMo in Malawi update

Kirsty Taylor — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:49:55 -0000

Wow, I was just thinking about the whole HIV/AIDS awareness work carried out in Africa today, and the speculation which surrounds it! I for one, having being involved in a similar project in Zambia, was concerned with how activities like games, drama and sport could affect such a huge issue, but infact I did learn to take a new outlook on it. I dont think such work can affect prevention of the virus on the whole in relation to safe sex, abstinence etc, but I believe work can aid aspects which surround the disease.

For example, discussing myths about HIV such as being able to contract it through holding hands or sharing cups were easily dispelled through simple chats and games. The stigma attatched to the virus was also huge and had a big impact on communities, so again, exploring such issues in an open environment allowed us to explore these issues where drama methods were particularly successful, looking at empathy and supporting techniques. Like any important issue, it's always a good start to be able to talk about it openly. It's almost similar to the sex education movement which is taking place here in the UK. What I did recognise is that it was very normal to discuss sex with young children in Zambia in a completely different way to the way sex is discussed in the UK, obviously due to the focus on HIV prevention. It wasn't seen as a taboo, a secret, a sin; more a case of life or death- if people will do it anyway, they need to do it safely, a conflicting argument I hear so often which suggests sex education at a young age will promote underage sex.

So.....I do genuinely believe that if the delivery of HIV/AIDS work can only have a positive impact if any at all. It's good to see Kondwani using more modern approaches too which I also witnessed in schools out there, something that the children seemed to embrace where the issue was explored in a very positive, open atmosphere, i think work of this nature seems to promote this attitude.

I would genuinely like to explore and gain more experience in this area as i do feel there is something positive which could be developed (not just wanky drama stuff!), so it's great to see Kondwani making a start and it will definitely be interesting to hear the feedback!

Re: Young People Involved as OFSTED Inspectors?

Khadeem — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:59:10 -0000

Hi masyomo, and I think your're right, and I think aswell as the new scheme introduced by Beverly Hughes ( Young Inspectors) along with the legislation from Section 6 Education and Inspections act, which puts a statuory duty on local authorities to inlcude young people in the evaluation of the service we can make it a serious thing in regards to Youth Services.

I think the most important thing is to have trained young people to do the job, and again I think your right about taking both sides into account, having Organisations take it seriously, whilst getting quality input from young people.

Re: Young People Involved as OFSTED Inspectors?

masyomo — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:28:24 -0000

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 :-)

Re: Young People Involved as OFSTED Inspectors?

Khadeem — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 10:13:16 -0000

Hey mike thanks for the link, and you raise an interesting point. There wouldn't to me be any opposition for this idea from young people. How we we avoid however allowing indepdent evaluators using young people as tick boxes to make thier evaulation seem "youth approved" becuase in areas of weak CHYP participation this could possibly happen.

Does anyone have any ideas how we could avoid this.

Re: Irritating Youth Work Terminology (now banned!)

masyomo — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:23:27 -0000

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!)

Re: Irritating Youth Work Terminology (now banned!)

Charlotte Goddard — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 07:03:47 -0000

I HATE "engagement". It is so bland and wishy washy. "Our project is looking to engage young people" - what does that even mean? We do tend to use it in articles but I try to get rid of it when I can.

Re: Irritating Youth Work Terminology (now banned!)

masyomo — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 09:42:03 -0000

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!)

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

ChrisCook — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:37:46 -0000

That of course leads in to the debate on whether or not youth workers should be professionally qualified with degrees! Which makes them more expensive. Which means they have to target their services. Which means you then get into the same problems we see with councils employing PCSO's to do a service the Police are too expensive and too bogged down in paperwork and targets to do. Or is that nursing?

I can understand the desire to improve the quality of a workforce - both volunteer and paid - to ensure the best service for young people. But it seems to be at the cost of being able to provide a global service that can better support voluntary agencies.

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

masyomo — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 15:26:57 -0000

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.

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

ChrisCook — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:53:57 -0000

As for your other point -> 'I think now we've got to a point where there's little place for volunteers in "youth work". - from my limited exposure that is very much where youth workers are heading. It feels to me very like the issues with vicars and curates in the church of england. As a former parish worker it was clear that you either employed someone to do it all - and let them do it - or employed someone who saw their role more as enabling others to deliver. I don't know that new and developnig workers quite have the ability to do this.

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

ChrisCook — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 14:50:18 -0000

From the sound of it - my hope and vision for the youth wing is very similar to what you were doing in your post. I've only been in post 15 months but we've moved from having just 4 support workers to 8, 2 volunteers to 7, 2 afternoon and 1 evening session to 3 of each plus 2 school time sessions and regular use by sixth formers in break and lunchtimes. What is frustrating is the limited funds and the need to fight for it all the time although I can see the benefits of that too. I would hope eventually to have regular weekend sessions but that is at least a year away yet until funds and people have been recruited.

Re: Word Clouds for Personal Development

masyomo — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:44:56 -0000

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..

Re: Word Clouds for Personal Development

ChrisCook — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:48:38 -0000

Hi Mike
If you have a facebook account have a look at this page http://developers.facebook.com/connect.php and follow the link to their sample application. A very simple idea but definitely the seeds of something worthwhile. I'm reading the code now and getting to understand how it works but it seems to fit this purpose perfectly.
Chris

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

masyomo — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 09:25:21 -0000

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.

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

ChrisCook — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:55:41 -0000

Running a centre is really a job for two full-time people. A centre manager to deal with weekday stuff and a junior worker to run weekend projects, allowing for better oversight of developing workers, coverage during absences and continuity when staff move on. As it stands, how can a youth worker develop weekend working when so much of their support structure and networking has to take place from 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.

Re: The Weekend Working Debate (continued!)

ChrisCook — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:55:29 -0000

In my role as a church youth worker I was set one day during the week as my day 'off'. I planned my week knowing that the only person who could change my day off was me - not my boss - but I knew I worked weekends. Now as a worker at a youth wing the culture is very different. Targetted referrals from the school and afternoon clubs only take place termtime. The expectation is that we open weekdays and young people won't come weekends.

The youth service administration and management tend to hold meetings and training for full-time staff weekdays only. Meetings with other agencies take place weekdays. Sometimes by 5pm on Thursday I have done a full weeks work. That's not to say I don't enjoy doing all this. I do. But why are centres setup with only one fulltime worker to manage part-time, volunteer workers and administration assistants (who work school hours term-time only) - its no surprise they don't work weekends.

Re: An Alternative to Accreditation

masyomo — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:09:28 -0000

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.

Re: An Alternative to Accreditation

bobweasel — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 18:26:37 -0000

Hi Mike, sorry that I ducked out the conversation for a few days! I would definitely be interested in continuing to explore this area so please get something online!

I still have thoughtful concerns over how the very nature of youth work seems to be against evaluating work, and instead relies on faith and trust in the process. I had some interesting conversations today where workers admitted to "playing the game" of evaluation to satisfy funders, but really felt that the facts and figures they provided didn't reflect the depth of their work.

Can there be a valid model of fully evaluating youth work?

Oh and what's with the switch from Disqus to Intense Debate?

Re: What makes a good Paid Youth Worker?

anna — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 10:41:40 -0000

I am training to be a youth worker and love volunteering at the local outh group. I a intrested in emailing other youth workers and finding out more about what youth work entails. So if you would like to email me you can at annabone104@hotmail.com. any help would be a god send. thank you anna

Re: An Alternative to Accreditation

masyomo — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:01:03 -0000

excellent - I'll get a 'play space' up in a bit :-)

Re: An Alternative to Accreditation

Chris Cook — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:44:31 -0000

Yes - I defintely want to keep exploring this. I am very interested in the idea of linking it into timelines and it strikes me that embedding videos of part of the journey could also be useful. I've started reading the api calls for Facebook and Bebo and they don't seem too hard but it will be the time to develop and I'm thinking its going to be at least 8 solid hours of reading and experimenting to produce something as good as your Google spreadsheet and Wordcloud.

I'll have a play a bit later this week when I have some spare time - instead of trying to improve my character in World of Warcraft. I wonder if Ning's support apps as well?

Anyway - when I have something worth playing with I'll let you know.

Re: An Alternative to Accreditation

masyomo — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:59:16 -0000

Thanks Hilary. Maybe surprisingly I do agree that this *can* be built into in accreditation schemes. I think I've mentioned before that I would make use of accreditation schemes where appropriate - we integrated first aid courses, supported groups to use the Youth Achievement Awards and I was part of the Training Action Group for the National Association of Club for Young People helping to develop their Keystone Awards programme to gain accredited status (through the Open College Network). So I'm not completely anti-accreditation, I just think the emphasis is currently wrong.

Where a programme offers real development opportunities for young people and its possible to add in the ability to gain a certificate or qualification without having to significantly alter how that programme works I think it makes good sense to provide.

Where a programme is directed by the objectives that somebody else has set for the purposes of providing accreditation but doesn't fit with the principles of allowing young people to find their own paths I'm not in favour of it. My experience is that its very hard to find accreditation with that kind of flexibility - I know that Youth Achievement Awards and ASDAN claim to be somewhere near this but I didn't find either flexible enough for the work I was doing.

My other issue is something I think the approach suggested here tackles much better and that is what do young people actually gain? If they do a series of things they're told to do in order to gain a certificate they may or may not take in what it is they were supposed to achieve or gain. If they're encouraged to reflect and consider their own personal developments I think they come out of an experience with a much better awareness of that development - and with this much more confidence to express what this is, and therefore putting them into a stronger position in things like interview situations.

That said, again you're quite right that this *can* be achieved by using accreditation too - if there's good consideration to the process, but its not achieved if people rely simply on the (usually questionable) value of the certificate. I have similar views about a curriculum too - on the one hand I see it as something to cover up lazy, unimaginative and unskilled work - on the other hand if structured properly it makes good sense for consistency and purpose (contradictory arguments like these keep me amused for ages!)

Re: Word Clouds for Personal Development

masyomo — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 15:27:09 -0000

Hi Hilary - I'll get a step by step guide up for how to do this - hopefully tomorrow, if not within the next couple of days.