Youth work in a Digital Age – Consultation with young people and practitioners

(Amanda Gerry will be presenting at the International Connected Generation Conference, Wednesday 21st 5-9pm #incgen11. Sharing the results from the consultation conducted in June 2011, sharing lessons learnt and future plans.)

Sunderland Voluntary Sector Youth Forum (SVSYF)) was established in July 2001 to act as a strong and powerful advocate for voluntary youth work in the city of Sunderland. We provide a coherent and consistent voice for our voluntary sector youth providers in promoting, supporting and developing good practice within the sector.

During the past 2 years it has become apparent that practitioners and young people’s use of social media is changing rapidly and we wanted to understand what was happening locally in the field of youth work. In June 2011 SVSYF undertook a small scale consultation with young people and practitioners to gather some baseline data to help inform our practice.

The results of this data has helped influence some of SVSYF’s work when organising the North East’s first ever conference regarding digital media ‘Youth Work in a Digital Age’, held at Sunderland University on 14th July 2011 attended by 129 delegates from 57 organisations.

The aim of the research was to gather some base-line data from young people and practitioners to try and understand the following;
• To find out practitioners and young peoples experiences when using the internet.
• To understand social networks, practitioners and young peoples use of them.
• To understand what challenges if any practitioners face when using the internet in a professional capacity.
• To explore ways of using social media creatively, and start to develop ideas on how we can expand this in a youth work setting.

Methodology

The research was carried out using an online questionnaire hosted via Google docs and promoted to via facebook, in youth work sessions and via detached youth workers.

Snapshot of Key Findings

The research highlighted that more practitioners (93%) than young people (85%) use the internet everyday in their personal lives, but only 1/3 (32%) of practitioners use the internet daily at work to engage with 85% of young people who are ‘online’, this is really a MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

¾’s of organisations surveyed have policies and procedures in place, but some of the very ‘tools’ that would aid engagement are blocked in a professional capacity. Practitioners (86%) have equal access to social networking sites but use them less (21% visit every day compared to 95% of young people).

Most (90%) young people do care about keeping their information private and 92% of them know how to change privacy settings, with over ½ (62% have used this feature in the past)

(77%) of young people would be happy to be contacted by youth work organisations via the internet and 63% would be willing to sign up to message alerts from youth clubs.

10% yp have given out personal information to people they don’t know and 27% of young people surveyed said they would ‘meet’ face to face someone they didn’t know but had only ‘met’ online.

Plans for the Future
• Formed a Digital Media Working Group with partners from across the city whose aims are to educate young people and practitioners, share good practice, advocate partnership working, influence decision makers including Youth Project Managers, and explore ways to use digital media to engage with young people not already accessing youth services.
• Developed Free Introduction to digital media workshops for practitioners
• Developed Social Media and online technology – Guidelines for safe and effective work with children and young people.

We are looking forward to presenting and meeting with you at the conference.

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