Why we need youth mentoring programs.
Recently in my state many of the youth mentoring programs have had to come to terms with losing their funding. This has led to a number of programs closing up shop and leaving many young people in the lurch. The big issue is that these programs provide much more benefit than they cost. […]
Is youth work suffering the death of a thousand cuts?
Over the past weekend I spent some time reading about the professionalisation debate which has swept the global youth work fraternity. I read that as an industry it is required of us to become more professionalised in order to cement our place in the human services sector. I read that we must become more stringent on who […]
Youth Work 2.0: A manifesto for the future.
We are on the brink of disaster! Our education of youth workers, lack of ongoing professional development opportunities, lack of self-care and professional support is leading to an under resourced service system at the breaking point. recently we heard that the revolving door at the end of youth work qualification is spitting people out of the […]
Change the future of youth work!!!
A number of years ago I was speaking to some colleagues about our concern that youth work as a profession was losing its ability to innovate and adapt to changing tides of funding and the needs of our clients. We spent a number of hours pulling apart the issues we saw and developing a thesis […]
2013 Australian Youth Affairs Conference wrap-up
From August 5-7 the team from Ultimate Youth Worker attended the Australian Youth Affairs Conference in Adelaide, South Australia. The conference was hosted by the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition the peak body for young people and the youth sector in Australia. For three days we covered the topics ‘youth participation’, ‘advocate for change’ and ‘support the […]
Get more sleep!!!
Over the past month my sleeping patterns have gone completely out the window. Sleep is one of the most important things for our health and mine has suffered for it. Here is a little reminder of how important sleep is:
Why so difficult: Understanding theory doesn’t need to be fear inspiring jargon.
I was speaking to some of my students recently about their time in the courses I teach in. Many of the student said the felt ill prepared and that they found that many of the teachers were hard to understand. When I delved into this it was that the teachers took pleasure in showing off […]
Local government youth work: Placation or proliferation?
In my illustrious career I had the privilege of being a coordinator of a small local government youth service for the lengthy duration of seven months. As I was transitioning to this role I was warned by a number of colleagues that this would be a difficult role for me to hold due to my […]
A sense of entitlement: youth work education in the 21st century.
Over the past few months I have spoken with over a dozen youth work educators from throughout the world about the calibre of youth work students coming through there courses. These course range from one year to three years and have people from all walks of life coming in droves to study. But one thing seems to […]
Firm, Fair, Friendly but never Familiar: Boundaries in youth work.
Over the years I have been asked hundreds of times about how to set boundaries in youth work. I have spoken to this issue in youth work classes from certificate to degree level. I have spoken on this in supervision session and in seminars. I have also written about it in this blog. Recently I […]