Young People can do great things – CSV Poster Design competition

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Tony Taylor

News of a poster design competition from the charity Community Service Volunteers [CSV], which happily doesn’t forget, but is rooted in its own history.

Young people can do great things…

CSV launch poster design competition to champion young people

This spring, young people are being challenged to show off their artistic talents in a poster design competition – #giveachance – run by the charity CSV (Community Service Volunteers).

The competition revives a nationwide poster competition run by the charity in 1984, which carried the strapline: Young people can do great things… if you give us a chance.

Keeping the original 1984 strapline, we want 2013’s generation of young people to show us their artistic talents by designing their own posters, championing young people and the great things they are capable of achieving.

As in 1984 young people are under attack. The increase in tuition fees, the prevalent culture of unpaid internships, and sky-high youth unemployment all make it hard for young people to shine.

CSV has always worked with young people to highlight their unique contributions to society, from its Springboard projects helping young people into work and training, to providing volunteering opportunities to help others.

Entering is simple. We’re inviting people to tweet their designs mentioning @CSV_UK and using the hashtag #giveachance, or upload to Facebook mentioning CSV’s page (www.facebook.com/CSVUK). Alternatively designs can be emailed to web@csv.org.uk

Catherine Flood, Curator of Prints at the Victoria and Albert Museum and author of British Posters: Advertising, Art and Activism, will select the winning competition entry and all entries will be displayed on the CSV #giveachance Pinterest board. The winning and commended designs will be displayed at a special exhibition at Springboard Hackney, and the winner will also receive a signed copy of British Posters.

The competition launches on Monday 13th May 2013 and closes at midnight on 10th June 2013.

About the campaign:

The poster competition is part of CSV’s ‘Volunteer Champions’ campaign, celebrating the role volunteers play in changing lives everyday across the UK.

How you can get involved:

Please show your support for the CSV #giveachance competition by writing about is on your blog or encouraging your social media followers by either tweeting on Twitter using the hashtag #giveachance or sharing our campaign on your Facebook timeline.

For more information visitwww.csv.org.uk/postercompetition

For competition promotional images please visit our dropbox folder.

Contact:

For more information or images please contact Alice Haworth-Booth

- Email: alicehb@gmail.com

- Tel: 07854928926

Youth Work and Schools : External and complementary, not internal and supplementary!

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Tony Taylor

To be honest we are a bit slow in catching up with the following National Youth Agency initiative, taken in late March.

New commission into the role of youth work in education

The National Youth Agency has launched an independent commission to assess the value of youth work within formal education across England and Wales.

The commission is being chaired by former Children’s Minister Tim Loughton MP and made up of key figures from both the youth work and education sectors including:

Fiona Blacke, Chief Executive, National Youth Agency
Baroness Beverley Hughes
Rosina St James, Chair of the British Youth Council
Mark Carriline, Executive Director of Children’s Services, Bury Council
Damian Allen, Director, Children and Young People Division, Children’s Society
Ndidi Okezie, Executive Director – Regions, Teach First

The National Youth Agency’s initial research has identified that the emphasis on a set of core academic skills has the potential to squeeze out another set of skills – how to think creatively, collaborate, empathise at the very time when they are needed more than ever.

Youth work has a key role in helping young people develop these abilities, as some schools have started to recognise.

The commission is keen to gather evidence and involve as many stakeholders as possible, including young people. Contribute your views by filling out our short survey.

To view the commission’s launch press release click here.

Our provisional response is as follows :

A discussion about the relationship between formal schooling and informal youth work is always worth having. However in the present climate we fear that the Commission’s predetermined desire to define interventions as youth work, which previously might have been called, for example, Personal and Social Education, Careers Advice, Pastoral Care or even Remedial Education is another moment in the continuing dilution of youth work as a distinctive educational practice founded on a voluntary relationship with young people. Youth Work as informal education in the service of young people must retain a clear independence from schools. It is external and complementary, not internal and supplementary.

And, given the NYA’s scant regard for history, it is necessary to note that a debate about this relationship is nothing new. Educational fashions come and go. Merely as an example, the issue was at the heart of tensions in the 1969 Milson-Fairbairn report. Bernard Davies in analysing the report points out the general feeling held over forty years ago maintained that “secondary school curricula and methods needed to become more responsive, especially to pupils reluctant to stay on. A more strategic youth service infiltration into formal education was thus seen as having great potential benefits for schools.”

In addition see our post Youth Clubs in Schools, which includes a link to a very relevant piece by Bernard on ‘Extended Schooling : Lessons for Youth Workers’.

Have a look at the NYA stuff, complete the survey and let us know your thoughts.

Youth Work and Inequality : Write for a new book, apply for a new job!

Posted on May 3, 2013 by Tony Taylor

We’ve received a note from Dana Fusco, Professor of Teacher Education at the University of New York and editor of ‘Advancing Youth Work : Current Trends, Critical Questions’.

Seeking practitioners whose work passionately reflects addressing youth inequality and who are interested in writing about it for an upcoming book on the topic! We are accepting abstracts of 250-500 words that should draw heavily on the practice context. Final decisions for submissions will be made by September 2013. Email abstracts to dfusco@york.cuny.edu by June 1st. Please share widely as we are aiming for broad global reach. 20 chapters from around the world. We will take three or so from U.K.

If there are any of our supporters, who feel they have something to say, but are somewhat intimidated by the thought of writing a chapter, get in touch with Tony to chat things through. And you are not alone if you are a touch anxious. In truth there are more than a few across our ranks, who are brilliant at articulating their thoughts in speech, but freeze at the sight of a blank piece of paper!!

This is an appropriate moment also to flag that Dana will be the keynote speaker at our next IDYW seminar on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 19 at the UNISON centre, Euston Road, London. More information to follow, but put the date in your diary. And, while we’re at it, given our parochialism and often ignorance of youth work outside our shores, here is the link to an informative and challenging piece by Dana about youth work and youth work education in the USA,

Working in youth serving organizations: The sphere of professional education

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Meanwhile closer to home it is heartening – given the shifting landscape in defining youth work - to see the following statement in the initial job details for a Senior Lecturer : Youth and Community Work at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

The successful candidate will have experience of and commitment to critical approaches in informal education in community settings. S/he will have used creative approaches and will have experience of participatory approaches to youth and community work practice. S/he will have explored and experienced the power of critical dialogue in work with community /youth groups. S/he will have experienced what it means to be part of a ‘learning team’ and have engaged well with a range of communities such as are found in diverse and fragmented urban contexts.

Further details here. For an informal discussion regarding the requirements of the role please contact Janet Batsleer (j.batsleer@mmu.ac.uk)

Living Our Values, Working Our Values : Critical Reflections on being a Youth Work Cooperative

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Tony Taylor

As something of a welcome antidote to the persistent propaganda about commissioning/competition in the world of youth work, here’s a chance to hear another side of the story.

Fionn Gregg of Voice of Youth gets in touch to say:

I am emailing you as I think you may be interested, or at least know others who are interested in this event and our workers co-operative. We are a youth workers co-op based in Hackney, East London. We run two youth clubs and do detached work, much like any other youth organisation… however, we are set up and run differently – as a co-operative! We believe in the following principles:
1. Young people choose whether and how to become involved with our groups and work.
2. Our work starts from the needs and wishes of young people in Hackney and all funding bids will reflect this.
3. We involve young people in taking action to improve their own lives and the lives of their communities;
4. We promote equality and challenge oppressive structures in society, institutions, groups and individuals, including in our own organisation.
5. We promote co-operative decision making in our own work, in our youth groups and in the communities where we work. …and that to work in this way with young people, it is important to work in a co-operative, equal manner as an organisational structure. Hence the co-operative!

Challenging Neo-Liberalism – inventing, imagining, kicking off!

Posted on April 26, 2013 by indefenceyw

Thus far in the history of our campaign no one has stood up for the economics and politics of neo-liberalism. Whatever our differences in terms of strategy and tactics there is a consensus of opposition to the deeply divisive, damaging policies of the present government and its predecessor. In this light find a couple of links that seek to stimulate debate about the creation of alternatives. Fair enough you won’t absorb them necessarily over the weekend – in fact you might well want to do more playful things! – but at the very least save them for a rainy day.

The Kilburn Manifesto: our challenge to the neoliberal victory

Elites are using the crisis of global capital to reassert power. But this is no time for retreat. Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin outline the alternative in a manifesto, which will appear over the next year in monthly instalments.

Chapter 1 : After Neo-Liberalism : Analysing the Present

This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed.

WHY IT’S STILL KICKING OFF EVERYWHERE

In this recent lecture Paul Mason returns to the question of resistance to neo-liberalism and the precarious position of ‘graduates, indeed young people without a future’.

All attempts to make the old model work without solving the global imbalances on which it rests lead to the policy of austerity: not just fiscal austerity, as in Britain and southern Europe, but a long-term strategy of reducing the wages, welfare benefits and labour rights of the workforce in the West.

And there is one massively important group that has been dealt not just a tactical setback but a strategic one. In Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere I called these ‘graduates without a future’ – the first generation in the West since the 1930s who will be poorer than their parents.[1] They will leave college with £30, 40, 50k debts. The jobs on offer are – as the famous Santa Cruz ‘Communiqué from an Absent Future’ told us in 2009 – the same jobs you do while on campus: interning, barista, waiting tables, sex work. The first post-college job is often working for free or for the minimum wage. There is no way onto the housing ladder, the ladder is now horizontal; and in retirement, pension schemes will be gone.

For this generation it is not a question of simple economic grievance but of the theft of the promised future. And I’ve become sick of hearing that the movement has ‘petered out’. No. It has been massively repressed. Tear gas fired indiscriminately into crowds in Athens, rubber bullets in Madrid, tasers and pepper spray on campuses across America. Non-lethal policing is highly effective against non-violent protests. It tends to clear them away. But do not think it has cleared away the grievances in people’s minds that led them to demonstrate in the first place. What it does is push those who don’t want to get their heads broken into a more sullen, silent, passive resistance: a resistance of ideas; or a resistance of small, granular social projects; or, as in Greece, anomie – where people just embrace the beauty of being hopeless, roll a joint, stare into each other’s eyes.

The crisis of neoliberalism, compounded by the total failure to emerge of any alternative within official politics, simply leaves unanswered the next generation’s question: how does capitalism secure my future?

But the world that was created after 1945 – a world of human rights, democracy and relative working-class affluence in the West – is now in jeopardy. And as long as all these things remain in jeopardy, it will go on kicking off.

Challenging Heteronormativity : Practice, Activism and Impact

Posted on April 26, 2013 by indefenceyw

News of a fascinating conference in a couple of weeks time at Brunel from Fin Cullen.

I hope you may be interested in this forthcoming event CYWS & BGSRC to explore youth and LGBTQ issues.

CHALLENGING HETERONORMATIVITY : PRACTICE, ACTIVISM & IMPACT
Bridging policy, practice and research

May 14, 2013 from 1:30-5:30pm• Mary Seacole building, BRUNEL UNIVERSITY, UXBRIDGE

Michael Barron (Belongto)
Prof Ian Rivers (Brunel)
Jay Stewart (Gendered Intelligence)
Amelia Lee (LGBT YOUTH NW /Schools OUT)

Mark International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia at a half day event exploring how activists, youth practitioners and academics can work together in combating homophobia and challenging heteronormativity in work with young people.

Though presentations and discussion the seminar explores:

What lessons can be learnt from activism/practice?
How might youth research and theory on LGBTQ issues be used to challenge gender/ sexual inequalities in schools, colleges, youth settings and beyond?
What are the new areas of research collaboration where academics and activists can work together?
What are the opportunities and challenges in influencing policymakers on LGBTQ youth issues?

ALL WELCOME. For more details email Fin Cullen (Fiona.cullen@brunel.ac.uk)

The day will start at 1:30pm on 14th May. The eventbrite to book a place is here:
http://challenging-heteronormativity.eventbrite.com/?ref=estw

The poster is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/eacfhe5lijklaws/cywsbrunel%20%20lgbt%20event.pdf

Please get in touch with any queries. Many thanks again in advance.
Warmest regards,
Fin

What is heteronormativity?

Heteronormativity is a term used by social theorists in order to discuss the way in which gender and sexuality are separated into hierarchically organised categories. It has become one of the most important ways of thinking about sexuality within the academic study of sexuality. Theoristshave argued that a discourse or technique of heteronormativity has been set up, and subsequently dominates, social institutions such as the family, the state and education.Heteronormative discursive practices or techniques are multiple and organise categories of identity into hierarchical binaries. This means that man has been set up as the opposite (and superior) of woman, and heterosexual as the opposite (and superior) of homosexual. It is through heteronormative discursive practices that lesbian and gay lives are marginalised socially and politically and, as a result, can be invisible within social spaces such as schools.

Theorists have become interested more recently with bisexual, transgender and intersex lives. If one is able to exist between gender and sexual categories of identity, then one provides a counter argument to the idea that gender and sexuality are fixed and/or natural human characteristics and provide a way to challenge or ‘queer’ our understandings of these categories. Bisexual and transgender identities are able to be read in this way because law, science and education often talk about gender and sexuality as fixed, immovable and pre-ordained human characteristics that fit into either oppositional group (male/female and gay/straight). Political rhetoric also often follows this script. The idea that people can live in a different gender to the one they were born into, or refuse to identify as either male or female, or that people can have intimate sexual relationships with men and women and reject the gay or straight classification, demands that we re-think the way we understand gender and sexuality, what they mean and what they are and can be.

Emily Gray

Taken from Gender and Education Association

A Framework of Ethics : Useful or Ornamental?

Posted on April 25, 2013 by indefenceyw

The basis for today’s would-be Institute of Youth Work meeting in London is the following document circulated by the NYA in March.

IYW proposal 3 of 4 – ethical framework march 13

We will be represented and our steering group has put together the following initial response.

IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK CAMPAIGN

INITIAL RESPONSE TO THE ETHICAL FRAMEWORK DEBATE

We are conscious of time limitations re the discussion on April 25, 2013 so we will content ourselves with expressing four areas of concern.

At the heart of the debate remains the question of defining youth work. The NYA paper continues to fudge the issue. It seeks to retain definitions, which stress the voluntary and young person-led character of the work, whilst referring to a commissioned NCVYS paper, A Narrative for Youth Work, which explicitly calls for an acceptance of the imposition of prescribed outcomes on the youth work relationship and process. Meanwhile in the field many youth workers are all but youth social or youth justice workers in name.

A renewed engagement with Ethics demands that we talk Politics. To take but one glaring example from the 2004 Statement on Ethical Conduct, social justice is first and foremost a political rather than an ethical concept. The struggle for social justice is fundamentally a collective project. Indeed this is partly acknowledged in the background notes which talk of actively seeking to change unjust policies and practice. Unfortunately there is a gulf between rhetoric and practice here, which cannot be ignored. Over the last couple of years a large number of workers have been warned under threat of discipline not to get involved in campaigns against unjust social policy – with or without young people.

This observation leads us to the possible Code for Employers, which is to be welcomed. However for now we will register concern about a future in which workers bound to the IYW’s code of conduct are employed by agencies, who refuse to be part of the overall deal. More immediately a management commitment to staff development, to the encouragement of critical internal debate has in the main been conspicuous by its absence. In this context too we note another contradiction that this discussion about an Ethical Framework with its focus on professional guidelines is taking place within a culture of profound mistrust with regard to worker/professional autonomy. Indeed we suggest that the managerial fixation upon predetermined outcomes is the antithesis of the youth work tradition of improvised young person-centred practice. It is at odds with the very notion of the distinctive, trained youth work professional, be they paid or voluntary.

Our final point is perhaps obvious. The shift from Ethical Guidelines to an Ethical Code is highly significant, even contentious. Ethics can be a minefield of differing interpretation. The danger with moving to a Code is that it suggests, even if this is strenuously denied, the possibility of generally agreed ethical judgements on, say, what constitutes ‘clear evidence of danger’ or ‘the nature and limits of confidentiality’ or indeed appropriate behaviour outside work. Inevitably this caution is heightened if the Code is to be used as a regulatory mechanism to decide who is fit to be a youth worker. All manner of issues are thrown up. For example, can an individual member of IYW charge another with unethical conduct? At the very least we are obliged to unravel the present formulations with a great deal of care.

In the light of this final expression of concern we think that a pluralist Ethics Working Group should be set up to take things further. If possible the next draft of a Framework should be less sprawling than the present version on the table.

The IDYW Steering Group

Remembering Our Histories : Memories of an Inner City Project

Posted on April 24, 2013 by indefenceyw

Back in January we reported on the National Trust’s decision to close its Inner City Project in Newcastle. Sadly the moment is imminent. However Alyssa Cowell informs us.

The Inner City Project closes after 25 years on 14th May – I’ve started to pull together old photographs and testimonials from both the young and older people who accessed over the years. The site shows (to me) how the lessons we learn as part of a youth group can last for years.

There is now an impressive site, Memories of the Inner City Project, where the history from 1987 – 2013 is being brought to life. One such offering is this moving poem in memory of Ian Johnson 1980 – 1998, written by the East end Trailblazers Youth Group.

We looked at you and saw a friend
Who’s golden world could never end
But don’t believe that’s all there was to prove
We’ll never know the real you.

You smiled through a thousand tears
And harboured adolescent fears
You dreamed of all that you could never be
And waded in insecurity.

We won’t say you took it all for granted
We were aware of all you had
We don’t think you were disenchanted
But we understand.

It seems as though we’ve always been
People on the outside looking in
Well here we are for all them to bleed
And no-one can bring us to our knees
And though we knew you through and through
We’ll never know the real you.

Spending time with this host of memories from the young and old involved with the project poses the question of how well in general we have preserved our histories. Sadly much valuable material will have been discarded and lost. It would be brilliant to hear from other clubs and projects, who have managed to preserve the past in the service of the present and future.

IDYW April Steering Group Notes, Membership and finances

Posted on April 24, 2013 by indefenceyw

Looking ahead we remain concerned that our activities are as transparent as possible. To this end find below the notes of the recent IDYW Steering Group plus the names of the members as at present plus a financial statement. We are still intending to test out with supporters a simple constitution by the IDYW event in London on June 19.

Notes of the IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK steering group meeting, April 9

1.0 Feed back from the March national conference, Leeds

Agreed that it had been very positive.
Agreed that we should liaise with Youth and Policy regarding their plans for the future as there was a genuine synergy between our two conferences.
Agreed that Sue Atkins be encouraged to write up her excellent contribution at Youth and Policy to the trade union symposium.

2.0 Choose Youth, April 11 meeting.

Agreed that Sue Atkins and Pauline Grace, who are attending should question the notion that the Choose Youth AGM formally adopted the manifesto. In fact the manifesto was never put to a vote in order to maintain a working consensus within the alliance. From our point of view the manifesto was seen as a work in progress, which CYWUU/UNITE in particular want to use to influence Labour Party policy. In the aftermath we have circulated the manifesto at the Leeds conferences.
Agreed that we would pursue our belief that what is needed is an open and pluralist dialogue across the youth sector. Sue and Pauline to propose a working group meeting in the afternoon of April 24 in London.

3.0 The Newcastle situation.

Inevitably, the momentum has slowed following the major rally and at this point people are reflecting on the next step. We have no further news on the campaign to support Don McDonald following his arrest.

4.0 The Unison launch of its young people strategy, April 24.

Sue Atkins and Malcolm Ball will be attending on behalf of the campaign.

5.0 The Institute of Youth Work – the ethics meetings, April 11 and 25th.

Our cautious response to the NYA overture to back the Institute was approved.
Sue Atkins and Malcolm Ball will be attending the April 25 meeting on ethics. As things stand no preparatory papers have been received. If possible, Tony Taylor to produce a brief paper focused on social justice as fundamentally political rather than an ethical question.
It will be interesting to see how the union response unfolds. Whilst the JNC staff side seem opposed, an article in Rapport softens the line, arguing for the potential of the Institute as a regulatory body.

6.0 The make-up of our steering group, constitution and democracy.

Agreed that the names of the new steering group should be published on the site; that further work be done on a simple constitution, and that we continue the experiment of using surveys to gauge opinion. Noted and welcomed that Paula Connaughton has now joined the steering group.

7.0. The second wave of Stories Workshops.

The Plymouth workshop is organised for early May, whilst negotiations are continuing with possibilities in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Sheffield.
We are pursuing with Limerick via Tania and Youth Voice a bid for European money to fund training with young youth workers around storytelling as a method of evaluation.
An embryo idea re collecting young people’s stories is to be further explored.

8.0 European developments.

Pauline Grace will continue to monitor developments on our behalf. Sadly the POYWE project has been stalled by a tragic accident to one of its key figures. We will continue to do our best to support this initiative. Pauline has also contributed to a conference in Lithuania on youth work and participatory research.

9.0 Dana Fusco, London event, June 19th

We need to confirm the venue – possibly the UNISON centre for an afternoon event. In terms of attracting students might we use the TAG newsletter.

10.0 Manchester University youth and community celebration event.

Bernard and Tania are liaising re an IDYW contribution.

11.0 Demand the Impossible, Leeds

Agreed that Diane Law and Graham Tiffany be approached to liaise with Ben Fraser, who is involved in this grass-roots initiative.

12.0 Politics and Ethics Autumn event.

Agreed that we should look to organise this event for the week beginning November 4th in Birmingham. We should check with Howard Sercombe and Sarah Banks as to their availability.

13.0 The Illusion of Outcomes

Agreed that Tony Taylor should prioritise finishing his paper as a stimulus to debate. Suggested that we think of organising a road-show of events, starting in Manchester in mid-June. Tony and Bernard Davies to pursue.

14.0 Curating for youthpolicy.org

Reported that the London/South-East group is taking responsibility for curating a page on youth and community work for the youthpolicy.org web site. More details to follow.

STEERING GROUP MEMBERS 2012/2013

Sue Atkins, Malcolm Ball, Andy Brown, Paula Connaughton, Tania de St Croix, Bernard Davies, Pauline Grace, Susanna Hunter-Darch, Diane Law, Don MacDonald, Ann Marron, Chris Ward with Tony Taylor as co-ordinator.

In defence income and expenditure account

In Defence of Youth Work

"that is volatile and voluntary, creative and collective – an association and conversation without guarantees."

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