Questions on: What is Youthwork?

 

I felt I had two very different experiences with each of these articles (maybe because I read them on seperate nights?) but wanted to speak on my thoughts and reactions to them separately first and then the overlap I saw.

Reclaiming Community: Race and the Uncertainty of Youth Work 

Chapter 1: Community Based Youth Work In Uncertain Times

Bianca Baldridge

From the jump I definitely resonated with the quote from Walidah Thomas personally. I feel what I get to do with youth in my organization is such a niche and critical area of work, my "baby" if you will, that I feel immense guilt thinking about leaving for another job. Which leads a lot into what Baldridge observes happens in Educational Excellence (EE). I've seen first hand how multiple and ongoing organizational shifts and staff turnover (due to low wages, poor benefits, lack of growth opportunity, etc.) have impacted our staff and our youth. Especially when it comes from the head leadership and their ideas of how an organization should be run/what they want it to look like. 

I also thought it was great that Baldridge started the conversation on teaching vs. youth work that we come across often especially when both systems are working closely together. This past year we've seen our youth struggle so much with everything that has happened and teachers not taking that into account and continuing to teach like nothings wrong. Granted even before COVID this seemed to be the practice and schools did not take into accounts other factors impacting our youth. However, a group of community partners where I work were able to identify some gaps and wanted to help both the youth and (we thought) the high school. We proposed to administration and departments heads that while the school gets very few students (and even less teachers) invested in summer school we all have so many youth come through our doors that could be doing summer school with us. They could incorporate their credit recovery needs into the already existing programs we had. We (and by we I mean me) matched existing programs to curriculums, standards, learning outcomes, the whole nine yards. If a student was building a boat with us over the summer they could also recover a geometry, history, and english credit. But because our department heads can't envision (or don't want to) that our programs, while non-traditional, are equivalent learning spaces. *ok rant over* But it ties into what Baldridge says in terms of professionalizing youthwork in the sense that it hasn't been seen as a professional space so how can we expect to be taken seriously by other professions? Much like our youth we have to continuously prove ourselves, our worth and that we are worthy of being respected.

Some Conceptions of Youth and Youthwork in the United States

Dana Fusco

I appreciated this text as an introduction into the history of youthwork. It really stood out to me how youth spaces that Fusco looked at were created by adults based on what they thought youth needed and as preventative spaces. The idea of "keeping them off the streets", "off drugs", or "preventing teen pregnancies" is still very prevalent to many organizations today and I hear it a lot from older adults in organizations (who, shocker are also the leaders of those orgs.) as their main goals for a program. Not so much what are the youth getting out of the program, how are we nurturing and helping them grow, or what do youth want to see in a program? And to play my own devils advocate, yes sometimes youth don't know what they want/need, but then isn't that also because youth haven't had a space where the idea that their voice and opinion matters has been ignited in them? If youth are being identified as having all these "problems" and our immediate action is to put something in place to prevent it as opposed to asking youth why they think this is happening are even really preventing anything or are we just putting a bandaid on a broken knee?

I look back to page 52 of this text when Fusco discusses how youth programs thrived until it became about educational outcomes. Which we then saw shift to social emotional learning and back (and now both?). How this shift into structured after school spaces and linking to the schools really hurt youthwork and youth feeling comfortable and welcome in our spaces. At the same time without being connected to a school there is often very little and competitive funding left for organizations. If youth are feeling the same pressures to perform a certain way in our programs as they are in school why would they want to come? 

Overlap

Both texts talk about how adults in youthwork measure success and outcomes which has been a big topic of focus for me in my organization recently. As a federally funded site a lot of our reporting on the progress of our programs needs to come in the form of quantitative data. Deducing youth to a number, a statistic.  Which puts pressure on our staff to push certain outcomes out of our youth, often in un-authentic ways, and shows our youth that this isn't just a space for them to be themselves. I think about who is defining these outcomes and how well do they understand our youth. I also think that as a leader in a youth organization if you can't show to a funder the why the qualitative data from our youth (did they feel welcomed, accepted, did being a part of our programs positively impact them, etc.) matters more than how well their reading scores improved being a part of your program, should you really be working with them? And if we're not changing the way we work and lead with youth, how do we expect youth to change?