Young People Matter

Is Youth Work Dead?

Lately, I keep having a recurring thought, “If I had time again, would I choose this career?” This thought is partly born out of a mix of frustration and passion. Frustration is my emotional response to an unfulfilled vision; it’s the feeling I get when other people just don’t see what I see. When I have these bouts of frustration, I remember the passion that drove me to do what I do. It is the passion that has guided me since I was 18-years-old, and what, ultimately, led me to the conclusion that youth work matters, because young people matter. 

I have been involved in youth work for almost two decades. I have been a football coach and a basketball coach without any badges to my name because that’s what was needed. I have cooked at drop-in sessions; organised more residentials that I can count; driven all over London to make sure young people got home safe, I have given the trainers off my own feet because I saw young guys with holes in theirs, or not enough money to buy the right trainers for the sport they wanted to play. I have counselled, coached, cried, and spent a small fortune in coffees and hot chocolates. I have taken mentoring groups back to my home and had my mum-in-law help me get the pizzas ready, while my two year old sat and played Duplo with these strange teenagers in his home. I have fought for funding a thousand times in a thousand different places, just so I could buy our programmes better equipment. I have cleaned and cleaned and cleaned to make sure young people have access to the nicest facilities. I have bought football cages, skate ramps, created video editing suites, gyms, gaming rooms, pool tables and more table tennis balls than you can imagine. There isn’t much I haven’t tried to do, to make sure that young people know that they matter to me and the organisation that I’m leading. 

Yet, over the last decade, I have increasingly seen that they don’t. The research backs this up, but why have we seen such a drastic decline in youth services and youth programmes? 

I fundamentally believe that youth work isn’t seen as essential. Historically, youth workers are paid abysmally. Take it from me, I know first-hand that this is true. Comparative to other service industries, youth workers are nowhere near as valued. When I’m asked why there is now such a dearth of quality leaders and practitioners in this sector, I say it is because it’s often a dead-end in terms of the scale of pay and training opportunities. 

It’s also a fact that when Government cuts come, youth provisions are eviscerated. Education is always a higher priority than the social and psychological well-being of young people. How can you innovate new programmes full of energy, invention and support when you don’t have the staff or the resources to do it? While there are still some amazing youth organisations doing incredible work throughout the country, they are increasingly becoming the exception. Do young people matter? Are they a priority? The last decade is starting to show that they are not.

Well, what about other historically active organisations in this field? What about the Church? As someone who has led youth programmes in both the Church world and the youth sector, I feel somewhat qualified to answer this.

From Church-based youth groups, faith-based sports initiatives, and home missions centres, the Church historically has always been active in youth work and because of this, it was active in its community. In 2013 I decided to leave my thriving youth ministry that I had taken from a small Friday programme to a thriving youth community. The impact Baseline had on my Church was incalculable. On one Sunday I walked into the building and saw that every department from the welcome team, cafe, kids work, sound, media and band was populated with Baseliners. The youth programme was fueling the Church. 

Yet despite that, I decided to leave. Why? Simply put, I wasn’t valued and my pay reflected that. My son was a little over a year old, my wife was working with me in the youth programmes, free of charge of course (that was the norm) and when the possibility of a raise was mentioned, I was told that my wife needed to get a job and I needed to go part-time if I wanted more money. We were so broke, we were visiting a food bank.

So I left and it still remains the most painful experience of my working life. 

This was standard practice for the youth workers I knew, who were usually the most underpaid and overworked members of staff. It wasn’t uncommon for you to be running three departments with youth work becoming an afterthought, all the while working 6 days a week.

Again, this wasn’t all Churches, but all youth workers felt the incredible pressure to consistently add numbers to their programmes, while not offending money giving parents and doing so on often minuscule budgets.

One could argue that there are more obvious reasons at work: increasing antipathy toward religion in the culture, the ‘alone together’ challenges that social media and tech have created, and historically successful models of youth work simply not working anymore. All of these are valid. However, I would argue that for anything to change, a simple question has to be answered: does youth work matter? If it does, then so do youth workers and so do young people. Does anyone honestly believe if you properly fund a youth worker, pay them a great salary, give them a well-equipped facility to work out of, provide leadership development and support, that they won’t make an incredible difference to the lives of the young people who attend? I know for a fact they will. The question is, do you?