• A Year of Youth Work in Lockdown: What have we been doing if not innovating?

    A year ago I was planning a workshop hosted by Youth Focus NW. Speakers were coming from across the country and there were lots of discussions over whether the event should be cancelled or go ahead. Taking the lead from the Cheltenham Festival, we went ahead with our chairs spaced a metre apart. That was…

  • Socially Distanced Social Responsibility: Engaging Young People Today

    Over recent years organisations have increasingly tried to engage with the digital world, but who would have thought that a global pandemic would be the thing to turn our practice upside-down? To the world, and its young people, 2020 was a year of change and instability; rules changed seemingly minute by minute. Life as we…

  • How to Stay ‘Engaged’ at a Distance: Youth Work and COVID-19

    Youth work is all about engaging with young people, engaging them because it is what they want and exploring things that they are interested in. For many, the relationship with their youth worker is the only one where they’re recognised in their own right. Recent research has shown that two million young people need such…

  • What Makes for Good Youth Engagement?

    This public seminar, the latest in the ISR ‘Good Society’ series, took place on 25th September 2019. It brought together a diverse range of people – from youth workers to foster carers to representatives from energy companies – to think about how we might engage and listen to young people more in our working, and indeed personal,…