Participle

Last week’s House of Lord’s judgment on duty of care widens our statutory definition of youth wellbeing. It’s about time. The ruling says it is not enough for local councils to put a roof over a homeless young person’s head, they must also provide all-around support. Safety isn’t just about attending to the most urgent of needs but also about adding to young people’s capacity to live life independently.

Participle’s work with young people in Brighton and Croydon is all about widening the definition of youth wellbeing. We’ve met lots of young people who have basic needs being met, but who are not thriving. They don’t have a real sense of purpose or possibility. They don’t feel valued. They don’t have the capabilities to find and keep meaningful employment, let alone live life on their own terms. We think the good adolescence is about all of these things--not simply having a place to live or staying out of trouble. We already invest in young people through schools and a raft of children’s’ services; that investment shouldn’t be about responding to or averting crises, but actually inputting into young people’s success. That means increasing their sense of self, their connections, and their capabilities.

Housing can be a powerful entry point to all of these things. Rather than look at housing as a way of getting young people off the streets, we should look at housing as an opportunity to build young people’s resiliency. This isn’t just an exercise in better coordination and ensuring young people have access to a full range of services. We need to look at what those services are designed to do, and the ways in which they help young people process past events and shape their sense of the future. The House of Lords was right to conclude young people are entitled to support beyond suitable housing; the real question is, what shape is that support and how can we make it an enabler rather than a gap-filler?

After an intensive 3 months of discovery and an even more intensive month of idea development Reach out is now entering the prototyping phase.  We’ve developed a vision of a ‘youth development service’ based in a fictional town called Thriving. A town where young people and adults take part in loops of doing, sampling and reflective experiences.

Doing experiences are self-designed projects where young people meet a need or goal in the family, community or workplace. A doing experience could be working with an adult to build a shed, running a campaign to reduce plastic bag usage or setting up a bike fixing business.  We think that through doing experiences young people can develop their capabilities and sense of purpose.  Doing experiences, like sampling experiences are followed by a reflective experience, to help young people reflect on what they have learnt and plan for their next loop of experience. 

Sampling experiences aim to expand young people’s sense of what’s possible by introducing them to new people, places and world views.  A narrow sense of possibility was one of the things that surprised us most from our initial research. Over the next few months, in the prototyping phase of our project we will be try out elements of Thriving with our partners in Brighton & Hove and Croydon.  So given the opportunity what would young people choose to ‘do’, who and what would they ‘sample’?

Back in February we worked with 10 young ‘design teams’ from Brighton and Croydon.  We worked with groups of friends and sibling to design experiences and services for people like them; experiences that would build their adult networks, expose them to difference and help build a strengthen their sense of self.  The three videos below give an indication of what life in Thriving could be like from a young person’s perspective. (Voices in these videos have been changed)

Communitube
Summer and her siblings imagined a community that has a ‘communitube’ website which links people of different ages through common interest. In their community there is also a network of local coaches who spot talent and link people to local cross age experiences and provide them the opportunities to try out jobs as trainees.  In Summer’s version of Thriving a film team continually documents what’s going on - the film is used later for local promotion and as a reflective tool.

Chocolate talent
‘Chocolate talent’ is a Willy Wonka a scenario built by two 14 and 15 year old friends. Two girls meet in a cornershop buying a candybar with a ticket for a behind the scenes tour to Cadburyworld. In their sampling experience the owner or the chocolate factory teaches them the science of chocolate, recongnises their capability for science and connects them to a trip to Nasa’s laboratory (located in red square Moscow).  At Nada they meet new ‘science people’ and following the trip make an online support group for teens to find their talents. They also get rich from the recipe of the new chocolate bar they invent.

Camp Croydon
In ‘Camp Croydon’ Karim and his friend spot an advertisment on the bus for volunteers - the free refreshments encourage them to go along and find out more. Meanwhile recluse Leo spots his advert on facebook. Eventually the two end up at Camp Croydon (which is not in Croydon).  The camp turns out to be one big sampling experience, Leo and Karim meet different people, live in different cultures and get away from the city a chance to breath and think about new things.

Over the next few months we’ll be prototyping doing, sampling and reflective experiences in Croydon and Brigton & Hove.  There won’t be trips to Nasa or Africa but we will be brokering young people to people and places that can expand their sense of possibility.  We can’t promise to make kids rich though their new chocolate bar but will set up doing experiences that give young people the opportunity to set up their own enterprises, and feel what it’s like to be valued.  Stay tuned.

Alistair Darling’s 2009 budget speech has come at a particularly volatile economic climate to “prepare Britain for the opportunities of the future”. Whilst the onus of debate and fiscal distribution lies in financial institutions, businesses and reinstating the labour market, Darling’s budget still seeks to “protect investment in schools, hospitals and other key public services.”

- A £20m Hardship Fund will provide “short term relief” for charities facing hardship in the current economic climate. According to Joe Levenson, director of policy for Children of England, “The new hardship fund is a good start and should provide welcome short- term relief at a time when pressure on the voluntary sector is especially great.”

- Unemployed young people will be offered 50,000 traineeships in the social care sector under a scheme called Care First. Young people who have been out of work for a year or more will be offered employment from subsidised social care providers.

- Grandparent’s roles in childcare will be subsidised this year; grandparents of a working age who take time out for childcare for more than twenty hours a week will be reinstated in their state pensions. Sam Smethers of Grandparents Plus describes this as a “victory for the principle that grandparents roles in childcare is recognised and should be illustrated in other government policies.”

- £260m has been put aside to help young people acquire skills and training for all unemployed 18- 24 year olds. Funding will be made available to engage young people in ‘socially useful’ activities and within job sectors in areas of high unemployment. According to the ONS, youth unemployment is at its highest since 1995.

- Last month’s miscalculation by the LSC led to a funding shortfall; schools and sixth forms are to receive £250m funds for student places, which will be resolved by creating 54,000 new student places. A further £400m will be allocated to schools and colleges to fund places for 16-17 year olds in the academic year 2010/11

- An extra £100 will be given to all disabled children through the governments’ trust fund scheme- where every child at birth and aged seven is given £250. Children with severe disabilities will be given £200. Christine Lenehan, Director of the Council for Disabled Children says the money will go far, particularly for those with profound impairments who are “surviving into adulthood in numbers we have never seen before.”

- £146m will be invested in teen community service programmes, whereby 16 – 19 year olds will engage in community activity as part of the Entry to Employment course. This is to complement new ministerial initiatives to integrate 50 hours of community service into the national curriculum by the time all students reach leaving age.

The fear of young people is called Ephebiphobia. At first it was coined he “fear and loathing of teenagers” but is today recognised as the “inaccurate, exaggerated and sensational characterisation of young people.” This complements the fear of street culture and crime, and is time immemorial; it is not just today’s generation that holds this sort of view but has been an issue for centuries. Millenia even. Machiavelli is said to have noted the fear of youth is what kept the city of Florence from keeping a standing army. Plato attributes to Socrates in the Republic:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company and, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannise their teachers.”

Similarly, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod noted:

“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise
[disrespectful] and impatient of restraint”

The twentieth century through sensationalism and media has seen the image of youth as embodying adventure and enlightenment, and therefore susceptible to a malleable, despiritualised version of morality. 60s student rebellions, drug taking, hippie culture, the Beat generation, and general ‘untoward’ behaviour seems to have come and gone for this generation; are the hippies of the sixties, now in stable jobs, the ones categorising our youth? Because the way that it’s seen now, this generation, more than any generation before it, is seen to be the most dangerous of them all.

Can you picture young people, who, despite disadvantage and overwhelming odds have the capacity to bounce back and are engaged, affective people? How did they do it? Why didn’t disadvantage become their destiny? Professor Michael Resnick asked us last week. As a expert in Adolescent Heath at the University of Minnesota, he had come over to give a lecture about youth development for Participle, our project partners and invited professionals. Michael Resnick talked about resilience and connectedness, about young people as resourceful, lively creatures instead of problems to be solved, and about investing in their development.

Reach out has just finished the first of four phases of work in Brighton-Hove and Croydon. We’re in the third month of our 9 month project!

Our goal? To co-design new models of youth-adult provision that enable young people to want more and get more out of life.

Our starting point? Relationships are important. Successful adolescents have a range of people in their life to support them. 

After two months of on-the-ground work, we’re looking beyond successful adolescents to the good adolescence. The language may be subtle, but the concepts are different. A successful adolescent is a young person who makes it through adolescence and into adulthood, well prepared to enter the world of work, further education, and independent living. The path is linear and the period time limited. The good adolescence is an experience that can occur at any age.  It is about exploration, recognizing what you’re good at, exposure to difference, connections to new people and new settings, and finding a sense of self /place in the world.  The path is recurring and elements are life-long.

Few of the adolescents we met are experiencing the good adolescence. We met about 200 young people and adults, and worked with 40 more intensively through ethnographies, psychoanalytic interviews, and design teams of siblings or friends. From comparing young people who were thriving with those who were not, we learned that four things seem particularly important for experiencing the good adolescence:

1) Feedback. Many of the young people we met receive a limited range of feedback about what they are good at and their underlying strengths (what we call capabilities).  They may be immersed in a particularly dominant setting, like a friend group or the media or school, where the messages they hear don’t expand their sense of what’s possible. 

2) Rich developmental narratives. Feedback is critical because it shapes the stories young people tell about themselves. The young people we met who are doing really well—who are experiencing the good adolescence—tell rich developmental narratives about themselves. These are stories that connect past experiences with the present and offer a future direction.  Most of the young people we met articulated ‘limiting’ narratives, stories that are about a single skill, talent or role and offer a narrow sense of future possibility. 

3) Connections across settings. Young people experiencing the good adolescence have ‘bridging’ relationships with people across at least three different settings—school or university, employment, a faith community, family, etc.  Bridging relationships are those that broker young people to new experiences and opportunities. 

4) Time and space.  Resource is also critical—in particular, access to time and space. Young people experiencing the good adolescence had the time and space to explore and find out about themselves. This was time and space between institutions (maybe school and college or college and employment) or while embedded in institutions (like prison). The time and space was structured—it was set aside for reflection and self-development.

Over the next few months, we’ll be coming up with practical ways to help young people recognize their capabilities, build narratives, connect with bridging people, and have the time and space to reflect and explore. These service concepts will span across a range of settings: business, home, school, community, youth services. As our thinking develops, we’ll continue to share….

Aspirations are too low. So says a new report by the Cabinet Office.  2.4 million young people, mostly White and male, have little to no ambition. They live in insular communities with few opportunities for exit. The answer is to re-appropriate the school as the focal point of the community. The Guardian quotes the Cabinet Office minister as saying, “Over the years to come we’re spending £35bn on Building Schools for the Future and we are spending hundreds of millions on renewing the fabric of the health service so in many low-income communities we are revolutionising public institutions. We have to think afresh about how those institutions become the ‘power supply’ for aspiration in the communities they serve.” Schools as hubs of community regeneration is not a new idea, but one that has produced results around the world. But it is not the building itself that lifts aspirations and cultivates hope. It is the relationships young people form with peers, community members, and professionals. Buildings can support (or not constrain) relationship building, but they don’t automatically generate new patterns of behavior. Later in the article, the minister describes how young people with a sense of community and religious belief have higher aspirations. That’s because they gain a sense of purpose--mediated through the wider range of people in their lives. The question is how to we increase the diversity of people in young people’s lives. Opening up more health centers, youth centers, and schools will not, by itself, change people’s experiences with people. If anything it can reconfirm existing patterns and power dynamics. What are some ways to shake things up? Hopefully, in January, we’ll start to find out as Participle does work with young people and adults, inside and outside of institutions. 

Contrast enables understanding. That’s why cross-cultural studies and comparative research can be so instructive, helping to trigger critical self-reflection. A 1992 article on the applicability of Western family therapy models to Japanese families might, at first glance, seem an unlikely candidate for sparking that critical self-reflection. But the authors get underneath concepts in a very vivid, tangible way. They argue that Western culture emphasizes separateness over connectedness. That means that problems tend to be defined in terms of individuals’ dependency and inability to function independently. What does this have to do with adolescence? Well, in Western cultures, the main ‘task’ of adolescence is conceptualized as independence--as establishing your own identity and transitioning away from the family unit and towards economic self-sustainability. As the authors note, “Problem solving in Britain is often directed toward increasing separation. Thus, independence and differentiation are the goals to be facilitated...In Japan, the ‘right’ balance of separateness/connectedness is defined much more toward the connected side of the continuum...To achieve connectedness in the family system, notions like mutual support, sensitivity to others, and maintenance of group harmony become important (p.7).”

The authors illustrate their points with a series of case-studies. One details a 14-year old girl who refused to attend school for more than a year, in part, because she saw herself as protecting her mother from her father’s nagging and that of her fathers’ family (whom they lived next door to). While British therapists might deem ‘individuation’ as the primary goal and the marital relationship as the focal point, Japanese therapists would take the cross-generational and spousal relationships of equal importance and work towards re-calibrating the entire set of relationships (p.10). While the methods and techniques of family therapy have undoubtedly moved on since the article was written, the case-studies and analysis are useful in helping us to question some of our most basic assumptions and get underneath concepts like independence and autonomy which are rife in the adolescent literature.

Source: Tamura, Takeshi and Annie Lau. 1992. “Connectedness versus separateness: Applicability of family therapy to Japanese families.” Fam Proc 31: 319-340. 

Journal articles can often feel completely removed from day-to-day practice. But sometimes, just sometimes, they turn a concept on its head and help you to understand the ordinary in a new light. That’s what a Leisure Studies Article—called ‘Street Corner Society’—did for me. It took the all too common occurrence of young people hanging around the street and put it in a new context. ‘Hanging around’ became conceptualized as a ‘leisure career’ alongside ‘school careers’ ‘work careers’ ‘family careers’ and ‘housing careers.’ ‘Leisure careers’ are the norm—in and of themselves, they are not a bad thing. In fact, quite the opposite, through informal interaction (away from parents, teachers, and formal authority figures) young people try out and rework their personal and social identities. In other words, informal interaction that occurs in informal spaces (i.e. not youth centres or youth clubs) is a critical part of the developmental process.

What’s problematic is when those spaces and interactions remain static and insular. As the authors write, “Repeatedly unemployed young men lacked the sites through which to establish new, more socially varied or geographically spread, social networks (p344).” This, for me, should be at the heart of our youth work—addressing some young people’s ‘network poverty.’ If we can come up with ways to expand young people’s informal social networks—and build more equal relationships between young people and adults—we could help ensure that young people’s leisure careers are an asset, rather than a deficit.

Article: Street Corner Society: Leisure Careers, Youth (Sub)culture and Social Exclusion by Robert MacDonald and Tracy Shildrick. In Leisure Studies; 26:3, 339-355.