Choose Youth, of which IDYW is a member, an unprecedented alliance of 30 voluntary youth sector organisations and trade unions defending the profession and its workers, has joined forces to save young people’s services from government and local government cuts and to preserve the right of all 13-19 year olds, and up to 25 year olds with disabilities, to an universal, open-access youth service provision.
As part of this ongoing struggle Choose Youth has produced a manifesto in praise and in defence of the modern youth service. It begins:
Created fifty years ago, the modern youth service is being pulled apart by the sheer scale and speed of the
government’s cuts in public spending. All signs suggest that the youth service will be the first public service to
go, destroying years of professional expertise committed to partnership and volunteer working.
Spending cuts to local services and government programmes are falling disproportionately hard on this country’s young people. Throughout the UK youth clubs and projects, young people’s volunteering schemes and a wide range of voluntary-led youth programmes are all now at risk, as councils race to shed services in the face of colossal budget cuts. Caught in the middle are hundreds of thousands of young people.
Sharp and to the point it should be in the possession of all those defending youth work as informal education. Although, unfortunately to my mind, the Manifesto declines to define youth work in this way, preferring to emphasise in its own words:
Young people’s services are dedicated to nurturing the talents of our young people. A professional, preventative service that supports young people on the road to success is more than paid back in the contribution they go on to make to society. For every £1 spent on the youth service £8 is generated in voluntary activity. [my emphasis]
Leave aside my concern, the manifesto is full of telling and useful pieces of information such as this costed reference to the generation of voluntary activity, which should be drawn to the attention of bureaucrats and politicians at every opportunity.
Download, digest and distribute!
TT
IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK 