I entered youth work through a Jobcentre scheme.
In 2001, when I was twenty, I was unemployed and had already spent several years navigating housing and the practical demands of being expected to live independently. I did not have a career plan. I was interested in writing, painting, photography, computers, design and making images, although I would not then have described this as an artistic practice.
The Jobcentre helped to fund a digital camera, and I received a PC for my birthday. I began teaching myself Photoshop. Through the Labour government’s New Deal programme, I found a placement with Hype, a youth magazine connected to Southampton City Youth Service. The work involved journalism, photography and graphic design. It brought together things I was already drawn to while placing them within a service working directly with young people.
This was not a carefully planned entrance into a profession. I did not decide in advance to become a youth worker, nor did I arrive as an artist intending to deliver creative activities. I entered through a practical opportunity and discovered a form of work in which my interest in people, communication and creativity could exist together.
The wider youth service included the internet café in Southampton’s Bargate and projects such as Youthnet, which were creating forms of digital access and participation before internet access at home was routine. Young people came to use computers, meet other people, make things and spend time. The technology mattered, but so did the social space around it.
Those projects deserve their own fuller account. What matters here is that I encountered youth work as something taking place through ordinary contact. It happened in conversations, shared tasks, humour, disagreements and the gradual recognition that somebody would return. Creative work was part of that environment, but it was not always the main event. Sometimes the important part happened while something else was being made.
Very early on, I realised that I was good at the work. I was informed by my colleagues, that I was ‘Good with young people’; it is an easy phrase to use, but it explains very little. It can make youth work sound like a natural personality trait rather than a practice requiring attention, judgment and responsibility.
What I recognised was that I was genuinely interested in people. I wanted to listen to them and respond to what they had actually said. I remembered details, followed conversations and was curious about how somebody understood their own situation. I did not find young people difficult to speak to, and I was not especially invested in performing authority simply because I was the adult present.
That did not mean I already understood youth work professionally. Interest and ease of communication are not substitutes for thinking about boundaries, power, safeguarding, opportunity or the authority carried by a role. I studied for a youth-work qualification and learned through colleagues, responsibility, mistakes and continued practice. My understanding of the work has kept developing; it was never completed by discovering that I had an aptitude for it.
I later became editor of Hype and supported other people coming through New Deal placements. The movement from being placed within a project to holding responsibility within it was significant. I had entered through a scheme intended to move unemployed young people towards work, then found myself helping to create similar opportunities for others.
My own experience inevitably shaped how I saw the young people I worked with. I knew something about being expected to manage independence without much structure and about encountering institutions at points of uncertainty. That recognition could create attentiveness, but it did not give me privileged knowledge of another person’s life. Similarity is not sameness, and personal experience does not remove the power or responsibility attached to a professional role.
This distinction has remained important to me. A practitioner brings a whole person into relational work: history, class, taste, humour, assumptions and experience. Pretending otherwise does not create neutrality. The question is how to allow that experience to inform attention without making oneself the measure of the young person in front of you.
Creativity was already involved in this question. Photography, writing and design could provide young people with skills, language and ways of representing themselves. A magazine could create space for authorship rather than simply making young people the subjects of somebody else’s account. But creative activity was not automatically empowering. Adults could still determine the frame, select the acceptable outcome or take ownership of an idea while describing the process as participation.
The work developed through Hype, Youthnet, Make Some Noise and Beyond Graffiti with local mural projects. I left Southampton City Youth Service for maternity leave in 2005.
Later, I returned to education as an adult and developed my artistic practice more formally before returning again to relational work in homelessness and supported services. Those stages form separate parts of the story.
Youth work did not begin for me as a vocation claimed in retrospect. It began with a government employment scheme, access to some creative tools and an opportunity I could not have planned for myself. Within that opportunity, I found work that took my interest in people seriously and gave creativity a social and relational life.
More than twenty years later, I remain interested in what first became visible there: how an opportunity is made available, how trust develops through repeated contact, how creativity can enable authorship without guaranteeing it, and how a practitioner can bring something of themselves into the work without making themselves its centre.
Earlier practice informing YAW · Southampton · 2001–2005.
This post documents work undertaken before YAW was established, but which informs its present thinking and practice.
YAW 