I work through YAW directly with young people and alongside the practitioners, managers and organisations responsible for the conditions around them.
The work brings together more than twenty years of relational practice across youth work, homelessness services, supported accommodation and creative engagement, alongside an established artistic practice. It begins with the particular setting, people and question at hand rather than a generic package.
I am interested in the point where a service’s stated values meet everyday life: how young people are known, what influence they have, how relationships are sustained, and whether a setting widens or narrows what is possible.
Creative Practice in the Life of the Home
A sustained relational and cultural offer for residential homes, supported accommodation and other settings where young people live or receive ongoing support.
I return to the same setting over an agreed period, becoming a familiar person rather than someone who arrives simply to deliver an activity. The work begins with what interests a young person: something they make, watch, listen to, want to try, or somewhere they are curious to go.
Creative practice is one route into the work, alongside conversation, shared activity, cultural visits and practical follow-through. The purpose is not a rolling arts programme, but to create the conditions in which a young person can bring an idea and have it taken seriously.
Read about Creative Practice in the Life of the Home
Practice Development and Review
I work with services that want to look carefully at how their everyday practice is experienced by young people.
This can include participation and influence, service culture, staff consistency, induction, support planning, language and records, preparation for adulthood, creative and cultural opportunity, and the relationship between a service and the wider world around it.
The work may take the form of a focused staff session, a longer programme of development or a review of a particular area of practice. It is not about importing a ready-made solution. It is about making the actual conditions of a setting visible, then thinking together about what could change.
Reflective Practice
I offer reflective sessions for teams, managers and individual practitioners who want space to think critically about the realities of their work.
Sessions can consider authority, frustration, attachment, boundaries, projection, institutional pressure and the gap between policy and lived experience. They can also make room for questions that are often present but difficult to raise in the middle of day-to-day delivery.
The purpose is not to assign blame or provide simplified answers. It is to create enough distance to see what is shaping a relationship, decision or pattern of practice, and to consider what responsibility can be taken from there.
Enquiries
I begin with a conversation about the setting, the question you are holding and whether I am the right person to work with you.
YAW 