Empowering Youth and Community Work PracticeýLM Series – serie

This book explores the role of the worker in facilitating participation, learning and active engagement within communities.

Focusing on recent initiatives to strengthen citizen and community engagement, it provides guidance, frameworks and activities to help in work with community members, either as different types of volunteers or as part of self-help groups. Setting community work as an educational process, the book also highlights dilemmas arising from possible interventions and gives strategies for reflective, effective practice.

Anyone working in the caring professions and education who wishes to understand the causes of difficult, disturbing and dangerous behaviour in young people and to find out how to change it, will find this book useful.

It shows how distress and disturbance is created in young people, causing their behaviour to become difficult and problematic not only to adults but also to themselves and to wider society. Using the latest evidence-based theories, the reader will learn how to detect and diagnose problems and work out strategies for helping young people in distress.

When people set out to qualify in youth work they do not anticipate that it's about managing themselves; aims, intentions and outcomes; programmes and projects; case work; educational experiences and environments; budgets; volunteers and staff; and young people's development.

This book ensures that students will feel confident to manage purpose, projects and people to deliver good- quality educational and developmental youth work with and for young people. It also caters for those with youth work management experience by providing an opportunity to review and further develop management skills and understanding in the context of a volatile policy environment.

Ethis is a vital issue for youth workers. Youth work projects are often established to encourage an ethical purpose among young people and this book helps youth workers to think about ways of developing ethical reflection in young people. It considers the establishment of organisations, by neighbourhoods and networks, to express an ethical purpose among young people. Youth work professionals will learn how to site their practice within the professional code and work in complex and unpredictable contexts. The book also encourages youth workers to think about the development of ethical reflection by young people.

This book focuses on the nature of cross-cultural practice, an inevitable aspect of working as a youth and community worker in multicultural Britain today. It enables students to understand how cross-cultural dynamics can set the tone of their relationships with their clients and helps them to understand how individual action and some processes in society can contribute to the marginalisation of others. This book looks at the processes involved in the everyday relationships forged through practice and how these can inadvertently influence the dynamics of oppression through lack of self-awareness or lack of awareness of 'others' in society.

This book explores a wide range of theoretical perspectives that guide the practice of community and youth work and related occupational fields. It provides a range of practical activities to encourage readers to explore their own theoretical position, while critically engaging with the contemporary theoretical context that is shaping the development of community and youth work practice. Students will find this book an invaluable tool in developing their understanding of theory, and it will help them to holistically and systematically apply their understanding of theory to their relevant practice situation.

In today's society, many young people feel marginalised and unable to find their own voice. It is vital therefore that youth workers are able to work with them to tackle this in a meaningful way. Drawing on the real experiences and difficulties faced by youth workers, this book will help those who want to work with young people in an empowering way. The concepts of empowerment and participation are explained, explored and critically analysed, along with the key notion of resilience. This is backed up by activities and case studies which help to bring together the theory and the practice.