YAW did not begin with a name or a plan to establish another service. It developed from recognising that youth work and artistic practice had been treated as separate parts of my professional life, even though each had been shaping the other for years.
I have worked with young people for more than twenty years across youth work, homelessness services, supported housing and creative engagement. Much of this has been direct, face-to-face work, close to the detail of everyday life: conversations around a kitchen table, travelling somewhere together, completing a form, making something, responding to a crisis or simply returning when I said I would.
My route has not been linear. I entered higher education as an adult and developed an artistic practice alongside my employment with young people. I have moved between these fields rather than progressing steadily through one profession or towards management.
Working at ground level
I have often chosen to remain close to direct practice rather than treat management as the expected measure of professional progression. This is not because management is unimportant. The conditions created by managers can determine whether thoughtful and relational work is possible.
My strongest interest, however, remains at the point where policy becomes an encounter: where a rule has to be explained, a boundary is tested, a decision affects somebody’s daily life or a young person decides whether the adult in front of them can be trusted.
Direct practice is sometimes described as low-level work. I have never understood it that way. It is where abstract commitments such as participation, respect, safeguarding and independence either acquire substance or fail. It is also where the distance between what an organisation says and what a young person experiences becomes most apparent.
Remaining close to practice does not provide innocence or certainty. A practitioner may be committed, attentive and caring while still holding institutional authority. Relationships can feel mutual while remaining structurally unequal. Proximity therefore brings a responsibility to examine one’s own decisions, assumptions and use of power.
Youth work and artistic practice
Artistic practice was not something I discovered later and added to youth work as an activity. Nor was youth work simply a social context brought into my art. The two developed alongside and through one another, despite being kept professionally separate.
Both practices have made me think about attention: how to help an idea take shape without taking ownership of it, how to work with uncertainty and how to bring something of oneself into an encounter without making oneself its centre.
Within institutions, however, youth work and art are often assigned narrow functions. A youth worker may be expected to manage behaviour, complete an intervention or move somebody towards an agreed outcome. An artist may be brought in to deliver an activity, produce evidence of engagement or make participation visible.
Neither use is automatically empty, but both can reduce a practice to what an institution wants it to accomplish. What interests me is the more difficult space in which youth work and artistic practice can make room for interpretation, conversation, experimentation and forms of knowledge that do not fit easily into a support plan or evaluation form.
Neither practice is inherently liberating. A creative project can be used to secure compliance or improve the appearance of participation. A warm relationship can conceal unequal power when a practitioner is unwilling to examine their own authority. YAW comes from this tension, not from claiming that art and youth work are the same or that their contradictions can be resolved.
Why YAW now
Over the years, I have watched the language and organisation of services change. Young people are increasingly introduced through referrals, diagnoses, risk assessments, support plans and expected outcomes. These systems may contain necessary information, but the problem begins when they become the principal way in which a person is known.
I do not want to present an earlier period of youth work as uncomplicated or ideal. Youth work has always existed within unequal structures, political pressures and limited resources. What remains important to me is its orientation towards the young person as somebody already participating in cultural and social life, rather than primarily as a case to be managed or an outcome to be produced.
YAW gives me a place to make that orientation explicit while examining the conditions that support or obstruct it. It also allows youth work and artistic practice to be considered together without turning art into a service tool or treating relationship as an uncomplicated solution.
Experience without certainty
More than twenty years of practice has not left me with a set of final answers. It has made me increasingly attentive to distinctions that institutions can flatten: between independence and abandonment, participation and consultation, boundaries and detachment, safeguarding and control.
Experience is useful only when it remains open to reflection and revision. Longevity does not make a practitioner automatically right. My experience is part of where I look from; it is not evidence that I know what another person needs.
YAW comes from repeated encounters in which institutional intentions and everyday experience do not quite meet. It also comes from moments when something genuinely opens: a conversation, a shared activity or a route into a place, interest or relationship that did not exist before.
YAW is my attempt to keep these possibilities and contradictions visible. It brings youth work, artistic practice and institutional critique into the same space, not to erase their differences, but to consider what each requires of the others.
YAW 