As analysis of the reasons for the riots replaces knee-jerk condemnation of young people, Bernard Davies reflects on NCIA’s research about voluntary sector youth work.
Four case studies show how local organisations are striving to continue community-based youth work despite pressure to deliver the latest policy initiative or be subservient to contractors.
The case studies show how government policies and local authority practices have entrenched unequal relationships between young people, youth workers, managers and local authority officers.
But they also show how trustees, managers, youth workers and young people have used a range of tactics to guard the space that young people need to express their individual and collective potential as they find their place in society. They have fought for democratic decision making and meaningful evaluation of what works and what doesn’t as vital components of meeting local needs.
- From partner to butler describes the tactics a youth council used to keep its voice when a council tried to limit young people’s local democratic participation.
- From merger to managerialism reflects on lessons learned when a community-based youth work organisation merged with a larger hierarchical organisation.
- Localism in action? shows how the process of bidding for a contract to run a local estate’s youth provision made improper demands on a community organisation.
- Short-term funding to meet external targets details a manager’s efforts to resist ticking boxes for the youth service and instead evaluate what worked and what didn’t in a youth project that accepted crime and anti-social behaviour funding.
IN DEFENCE OF YOUTH WORK 
With reference to the first case study ‘From partner to butler’.
It doesn’t surprise me at all. I’m afraid it is exactly what I would expect from a local authority. I’m afraid I think the idea that local authority officers (senior managers) would be interested in promoting democracy somewhat naive. We don’t really live in a democracy – more a modified form of monarchy. Local authorities display this even more than central government (maybe just because they do it in a less sophisticated way possibly). These bureaucrats will be interested in getting their end-of-term reports in and looking good for their senior managers – so they can claim brownie points (royal approval). Democracy is unlikely to help and would probably unsettle their plans. There are no bonuses for promoting democracy as an outcome.
Does that mean that these kinds of projects should avoid state/L.A funding altogether? Potentially, yes. But then that means trying to find a Charitable Trust able to do large scale funding – not necessarily an easy task. And; another disappointing factor, is that that pushes the projects out of the social/community sphere into a more privatized realm. Getting public funds seems (to me) to endorse a project as a real social/community project. It is just a pity that the managers of the funding (as the report shows) will then try to use it to serve their own bureaucratic and self-serving ends.
So – what model is possible to fund youth projects? I suspect that the answer is that the projects have to be self-funded – by parents, selling things made by the young people, maybe (there are some examples of this) selling their ‘credibility’ to local businesses in exchange for sponsorship. That is – to become small mirco-businesses.
What do people think?