Resources: Classic text revisited - From Strength to StrengthMaggie Jardine, 1987

From Strength to Strength was a resource pack published by the National Youth Bureau and Northern Ireland Association of Youth Clubs in 1987 that provided a comprehensive guide for workers looking to develop unit training within their club. It provided the opportunity and framework to reflect on the process of linking organisational development to individual development, based on an action learning approach. This approach uses the idea that people learn from exploring issues and solutions with others and then take action and review the consequences.

The language is simple, straightforward and informative. The ring-binder design made it user-friendly, although the colour of some of the pages will literally leave you seeing red. Back in the day, it provided a reassuring framework for workers to support the implementation of training. While some of the content is outdated, much of it is still relevant today, since it is based on the key issues of exploring the needs of young people (Activity 3) and developing an organisational plan (Activity 10) to address these needs. A plan based on exploring individual roles, agreeing the "steps", taking action and reviewing how it went may seem pretty basic, but these are activities that many organisations could still benefit from doing.