Building Relationships through Effective Interpersonal Engagement: A Training Model for Youth Workers

This is the first part of the introduction...
‘The role of the youth worker is to create relationships of trust and respect with young people and work with them in ways that combine enjoyment, challenge and learning. Successful outcomes will largely be dependent on the relationship between the youth worker and the young people.’ (Department of Education for Northern Ireland, 2005:13)
In recent years community youth work has been increasingly under pressure to ‘organise practice around outcomes, curriculum and delivery’ (Jeffs and Smith, 2008), and become more target driven with an emphasis on measurable outputs. This has led to practice being problem-orientated, focused on accreditation and often responding to externally imposed curricula. This is at odds with a profession that is historically young person-led and embedded within process-orientated approaches emphasising ‘togetherness’ and the ‘interpersonal voluntary relationships’ between the practitioner and young person (Smith, 2003).