Our aim is to work together with young people to foster learning and long-term positive change within young people and the communities in which they live.
We aim to help young people get in touch with their humanity and understand what it is to be fully human - not in a 'fallen / broken' sense of humanity, but in the true 'what God made us to be, embodied in Jesus' sense of what it is to be human. You can see our ideas of what it is to be human are influenced by our understanding of what Jesus reveals to us about God, but are also influenced by thinkers, writers and mystics such as Paulo Freire and Julian of Norwich.
We primarily use detached work to contact young people and to develop positive and purposeful relationships with them. The relationships with young people may remain on the streets, or may develop into doing leisure activities, project work, trips and residentials together. We aim to create relationships that are consistent and non-judgemental, where we can listen to and learn from young people and work together to develop activities, projects and community action of young people’s choosing. The young people, the relationships formed with them and the learning fostered within them are the most important aspects of our work and detached work is a good vehicle to create and sustain these dignifying, young-person centred relationships.
To read more about detached work as a method, visit the link on the Project's page.
Our working practices are informed by:
• the principles and practices of informal education with oppressed young people,
• reflection in and on action, (ie. both whilst we are working with young people and after work)
• the demands of the professional body of youth and community work
• the challenge of loving as Christ loves
• Christian contemplative principles and practices
• and the realities of working with young people.
We try and do all this whilst maintaining a good sense of humour (which we frequently need!) and whilst still being able to honour and enjoy the other ‘non-work’ elements of our lives.
The project has an office, where workers meet and plan. Currently, we don’t have our own youth work premises. Instead, if a group want to meet somewhere inside locally, or we need building space, we negotiate with local churches and community organisations to use their buildings as needed. This enables the project to offer work local to young people within their specific communities. However, recently we have begun to explore the possibilities of moving to larger office space, which would enable young people to access us more easily during the daytime in an informal indoor space, with computers, internet and space to chat, think and work. We would still run drop-ins and evening building-based work in local community locations. |
