Are the days of open youth work numbered?

One after another, the municipalities of England have announced massive cuts to their youth services, and the refocusing of any remaining youth work on more targeted activity directed at those on the margins.

My old voluntary youth centre closes its doors to young people at the end of this month, after 40 years of week-in week-out youth club provision and much, much more. One of my former colleagues has been involved there for 35 years, as member, volunteer and part-time worker.  They were given two weeks’ notice. Seemingly, the days of open youth work are numbered. Youth work generally is a pale shadow of its former self.

But now the protagonists of open youth work have formed a European network, drawing on commitment to such practice from countries such as Switzerland, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria – as well as the UK. In mid-January, in Vienna, the first conference organised by the network of Professional Open Youth Work in Europe took place.

The conference brought together practitioners, researchers and policymakers in the youth work field from across Europe. The spirit was buoyant, with passion and commitment exuding not only from those with long traditions of open youth work, but among those eager to establish it – in countries such as Romania and Croatia. The feeling was that youth work could survive, but only if it retained certain fundamental principles and did not become shackled to wider policy agendas or reduced to the provision of positive activities and individual support.

Developmental space
Few would dispute that some youth work needs to strengthen its focus on certain groups of young people and also needs to ensure connections with health, education, labour market and criminal justice policy agendas. But it can be asserted that it is open youth work that provides the base camp for this more adventurous, targeted and creative practice. And many more young people need an associative and supportive developmental space that supplements, but does not substitute for, their formal educational engagement.

As I reflected on the demise of youth work in a centre I myself served for 24 years, I thought about how it gave young people sanctuary, self-belief, new horizons, space to be themselves, advocacy and support, information and guidance, different ideas, and changed plans for the future. My youth work might sometimes have been largely leisure-based provision, but at other times it held young people’s lives together when everything else in their teenage and young adult lives was going pear-shaped: school, work, lack of work, family relationships, girlfriends and boyfriends, peer groups and more. And I was there for the most troubled and troublesome, dealing unsensationally and often invisibly with issues to do with drugs, crime, sexual health and homelessness.

With some resurgence of activism around the open youth work agenda, is it possible, now, to cry with more optimism that Open Youth Work is dead, long live Open Youth Work? Or is this the deluded lament of the desperate, the dinosaurs or those already departed from the realities of contemporary youth policy formulation?

Howard Williamson is professor of European youth policy at the University of Glamorgan