The Ulsterman's accessible, open-door policy at The NYA along with his eloquence and wit have endeared him to nearly all who have come into professional contact with him.
Wylie's gathering fell rather fittingly on the same day as the publication of the Government's youth strategy, Aiming high for young people: a ten-year strategy for positive activities, which will feed into October's Comprehensive Spending Review. Providing testimony to his influence, minister for the third sector Phil Hope said Wylie's "fingerprints" were all over the strategy.
The document's stress on empowerment through giving young people more budget-holding responsibilities and access through an expansion in youth facilities is hugely welcome - as is the 184m of new investment. But while the strategy demonstrates proper focus on providing young people with "places to go" and "things to do", it has underplayed the importance of the "someone to talk to" epithet of Youth Matters. A consistent bugbear of Wylie's has been the insufficient attention paid to youth workforce development at all levels. Youth work is not just about having a youth centre to go to, just like having a house is not necessarily the same as having a home.
Wylie's successor Fiona Blacke takes over the running of The NYA next week. As the organisation enters this new phase, it needs to ensure that all policymakers properly understand that youth work is delivered in many settings and that as an organisation it is not captured solely by the interests of the traditional local authority youth service. It must continue to modernise its thinking about youth work and be unstinting in its promotion of it. Wylie, as he would put it, has always adopted the approach of "speaking truth to power" and that is the only way.
He once observed in the pages of Young People Now that youth workers and his Northern Irish countrymen and women share the same temperament, summed up in the phrase: "It looks like rain." As Wylie prepares to exit the stage, the 10-year strategy, despite some shortcomings, is a powerful ray of sunshine.
