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Apologies for the extended break between this and the previous entry, it wasn’t actually meant to be quite as long as it was. My last post, in early August, was just before I went to Scotland for a few days, and ever since I’ve been back I don’t seem to have got in the swing of updating my blog.
However, many long-running TV programmes have a “summer break”, and I think being away from a blog for a while probably is no bad thing. That’s not to say I haven’t actually written anything in that time, but I’ve never got to the stage where I’ve wanted to publish anything. Perhaps I’ll go back and you’ll see some ‘catch-up’ posts over the next few weeks.
I haven’t totally been skiving in my time away. As well as trips to Scotland, Wales and France, I’ve been busy at work worrying about the Olympic and Paralympic Games. But I’ve also been working on a new project (which, if truth be told, I actually did back at the start of summer but also seemed to get lost in the lazy days of September).
We Need Young People is an idea I’d been kicking around for a while. Partly it is me trying out some new technical ideas (everything from producing XML feeds to generating automatic Twitter updates). But primarily it is based on my thinking that “there must be a better way to do this.”
At work we regularly get emails sent around saying ‘we’re looking for young people to…’, whether it’s from a TV production company desperate for a teenage mum to appear in a documentary, to cash awards that are available for innovative projects initiated by young people. I’m sure there are countless projects, competitions, requests etc that are floating out there, all hoping to reach young people.
Email is obviously quite effective, but it’s not desperately efficient and also by only telling people you already know about projects, only the same young people hear about the same projects.
Surely, if someone could pull all this information together, and present it in a way that it could be divided up so the signal-to-noise ratio wasn’t quite so high, then it could become a really useful tool. Particularly if the data wasn’t just available on a single website, but able to be placed wherever young people, and their adult supporters, were likely to be looking.
So that’s essentially what I’ve built. Add your project etc (or one that you’ve found) by completing a simple form, wait for it to be moderated, and then watch as it is released for the rest of the world to consumer as they see fit. Or, take the data and build something clever with it; on your website, on Facebook or whatever you feel is most appropriate.
It’s early days, and I’m realising that like most great projects there needs to be a critical mass of data in the system before it becomes useful, but hopefully if people can see the benefit they’ll spend a bit of time adding their content.
Let me know what you think, it is very much a work in progress so it’ll develop over time and all feedback is useful.
And, I promise, it won’t be a couple of months before my next post.
Photo courtesy of Bob AuBuchon. Used under licence.
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Monday’s papers covered the news that Bear Grylls is to become the new Chief Scout, taking over from Peter Duncan. Most of the coverage has been positive; shame on the Daily Mail for their rather churlish attack by leading on his TV-fakery claims (claims that indirectly resulted in him getting the Chief Scout job).
BBC Home Affairs editor Mark Easton picked up an interesting part of this story when he looked at whether changing work patterns are the reason that Scouts, like every other youth organisation, are struggling to recruit enough leaders to satisfy the demand from young people. (He picks up on an issue I’d written about ages ago – that young people would love to participate in activities if only there were the adults to run them).
But I think he’s swallowed the Scouts line a little too easily – there is an obvious reason why they don’t want to make too much of the negative stereotypes that Scout leaders have had. If you don’t think CRBs deter volunteers, read the comments here.
Mark’s argument is that in “the olden days”, when workers worked 9-5, they would be able to get home and dutifully go off to run their local scouting group. Nowadays, with flexible hours, and work eating into more of people’s leisure time, the ability to volunteer in this way is impossible.
There is probably an element of truth in this. But Mark assumes that Scout leaders were office workers, and I’d wager that in much of the country they often were blue-collar workers, working in shifts in factories or trades where you stopped working when you’d finished the job.
We might have a culture of more flexible working, but that works both ways. Again, I’d wager that 30 years ago most companies wouldn’t have had a CSR section of their annual report, nor have a volunteering policy or recognition that skills developed outside the organisation can be extremely beneficial to what the employee does whilst at work.
And whilst I’m sure there are companies where if you asked your boss if you could leave half-an-hour early to help run your local Scout troop you’d be told exactly where to go (and it wouldn’t be in the direction of the Scout hut), I’d reckon the number of employers who would be receptive to the idea is increasing not decreasing.
So, I think both Mark Easton and the Scouts are missing the point. If people wanted to volunteer for their local Scout group then there are ways and means of making it happen. I just think the role isn’t attractive enough: there are too many negative connotations associated with it, there is too much red-tape, there are old-fashioned attitudes in the Scouts that just don’t sit comfortably with the young adults that the organisation needs to attract. But I don’t think this is exclusively an issue with the Scouts, I think many of the points equally apply to other youth organisations.
All that said, I wish Bear the best of luck in his new role; he’s young and enthusiastic enough to push through radical changes and make the Scouts an organisation that people want to volunteer for.
Image courtesy of wwannaby. Used under licence.
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Gordon Brown has announced that he wants to require young people to undertake 50 hours of community service, and that this will form part of Labour’s manifesto for next year’s (presumably) general election. It’s not particularly surprising; David Cameron and the Tories have long been floating the notion and Gordon Brown was responsible for the setting up of youth volunteering charity V and generally pushing for young people to be more active in their community.
But I think it’s a horrendous idea. The suggestion is that it will help charities, but personally I can’t think of anything worse than third sector organisations being expected to provide opportunities for young people mandated to do “goodly works”. Compulsory volunteering is a total misnomer.
There’s loads of reasons why I hold that view.
Firstly it will force an unnecessary formalisation of community service. Alongside the (disgracefully) large number of young carers in this country, there are many other young people who help others in their community by running errands, visiting, looking-out-for or taking them on trips. It’s unlikely that these activities will count towards compulsory community service, and if they do they will have to be formally assessed, agreed and recorded in a way that destroys both the relationship the young people had with the person they were helping and the reason they were helping them out.
It removes any form of social entrepreneurship: how are you going to be able to prove your community service if you have set up your own activity. Setting up an online support site, tidying up somewhere close to your house or running a street football league: these are all legitimate community activities that a young person could do without any involvement of an official organisation to oversee their contribution. Why should a young person be told that these are not acceptable activities but joining an organisation is? And if these are acceptable, how are you going to ensure that people are actually doing these activities and not just saying they are? How are you going to ensure the scheme recognises social entreprenuers but isn’t used by those wanting to duck out of getting involved?
My concern is that this creates a dangerous connection between the government and the third sector. Just as no-one is forced to give to charity, there is something wrong with government forcing people to volunteer.
Secondly, what is the scope for deciding what and what isn’t community service? Is being involved in your school council? Is being involved in a political party community service? Is playing in a community orchestra, football team or performing street dance community service? If it isn’t, is tutoring or mentoring others in those activities community service? (and if so does your training count in those hours?).
Thirdly, only this week a story broke that many teachers think that the efforts to increase literacy have led to children losing the enjoyment of reading for pleasure. I think the same will be true of compulsory community service.
Many young people volunteer to improve their CV or to develop a skill, but many more volunteer because they want to make a positive contribution. They don’t want to undertake volunteering to tick boxes or simply get a record of their achievements. This was one of the failings of Millennium Volunteers, repeated with V and going to be far worse where there is a mandatory requirement to do this. From a personal perspective, one of the reasons I didn’t want to do my MV was that it seemed to be more about achieving a set number of hours than the value you added to a project.
Indeed, Volunteering England wrote something similar last month (about using volunteering as a way of assessing people applying for permanent UK residence):
Active citizenship activities should be meaningful and enjoyable to present a good image of community participation in the UK and not imply that volunteering is purely a means to an end. If activities do not serve a community need or if the verification arrangements are too simplified, the process could become a “tick-box exercise” and provide the applicant with little benefit.
Finally, why is it just young people? What message are we trying to convey if we say that only those under 19 should be mandated to be involved in community service whereas everyone else only needs to choose to?
And I as every youth organisation will tell you until they are blue in the face; the lack of the young people isn’t the problem: it’s the youth leaders needed to support them. I volunteered for many years as a youth leader, but I don’t think I would have done so had I had to work with young people who didn’t want to be there apart from whatever threat the government will use to get them to complete their community service.
Yes, I definitely want more young people to volunteer and be involved in their community. But I don’t think it’s through forcing them to complete a certain number of hours or tick a particular set of boxes, any more than using volunteering as a stick to reduce student tuition fees etc.
Young people need to be engaged citizens, active in their community, not because they are forced to but because they want to. It would be so much better if Gordon Brown and David Cameron both changed their pledges from making every young person undertake community service to making a society where every young people wants to undertake community service.
And if you do want to volunteer, try here.
Images courtesy of Paul Allison. Used under licence.
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Wednesday saw the official announcement of the new National Body of Youth Leadership. And I’m really rather excited about it.
For more years than I care to remember (from 1995), I’ve been involved in running, and then writing and developing, youth leadership courses through my volunteering with St John Ambulance. The Youth Hostel in Matlock became my second home for a while, the number of courses I was delivering there. The organisation’s Cadet Leader 2 course was the single reason that I didn’t leave St John when I was 17 and, as a trainer, has since provided some of my most memorable and enjoyable weekends.
I’ve been aware that similar organisations are doing equally as wonderful things, and when I came to help rewrite the Cadet Leader 1 course in 1997, I remember thinking there must be other excellent resources out there. This was in the very early days of the internet, and although the fabulous Scoutbase existed, it was run by a bunch of keen enthusiasts rather than as an official programme resource. And before the internet, it was decidedly more difficult to do casual research on what other people were up to.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award demonstrates the power of putting a universal name to what effectively could be fitted into every informal education / youth development programme going. The DofE not only helps employers and universities/colleges identify the commitment and development that a young person has been through, but also ensures that the young people see their effort for what it’s worth. It’s only as I moved from young person to youth worker that I recognised the enormous value of those random weekends I’d be sent off to go and learn about John Adair’s model of leadership, or do blindfold exercises around a car-park.
What I really hope if that the NBYL becomes a centre of excellence, using the vast knowledge already in the sector to develop a way of making youth leadership training as recognisable as the DofE. That doesn’t mean having a single programme that all operators have to work to, but valuing particular elements of learning and from that being able to issue young people with a universal certificate that is recognised by employers, educators and peers alike.
Photo credit: Corypina. Used under licence.
