The old youth work mottos still ring true

I have become acutely aware of this following a strange little project I recently undertook. Out of the blue, Simon Antrobus, chief executive of Clubs for Young People, contacted me and asked me to modernise his organisation's original mission statement of 1924.

Clubs for Young People is the latest name for a youth organisation that started out as the National Association of Boys' Clubs. By the late 1980s, there was a dinosaur feel to a youth organisation that catered solely for young men and was arguably too associated with boxing. (What goes around comes around, and both of these issues are now being debated again.) I contributed to a national conference around that time where we interrogated how the organisation might reconcile its traditions with new expectations around the youth work curriculum and principles such as participation and equal opportunities.