Learning from the Streets

In the month of the release of her new book, From Isolation to Community: Youthwork in the Covid era and beyond, I caught up with my friend Jenni Osborn to ask her about what the book is about, and what readers of it can expect, here are my 5 questions with Jenni I hope you enjoy!

So Jenni, What’s It About?

The book is about youth work during covid, it tells the story of what youth workers up and down the country have been doing during the pandemic to keep in contact with and sustain relationships with the young people they have been working with. I spoke to a lot of those working with young people in different contexts, some of whom were friends and others who responded to the various cries for help on social media! All of whom were inspiring in some way or other. I reflect on the work, and also begin to talk about what needs to happen next. It’s really hard to see where this pandemic might end, or at least how we might learn to live with it as we do for flu or other highly infectious diseases. But we can begin to consider what sort of a world we want to rebuild and hopefully I’ve begun this conversation.

What prompted you to write it?

It was actually because I began a podcast in the summer of 2020, with the theme of supporting those who support young people and so was talking to many amazing youth workers who were telling me their stories about the work they had carried on doing all through the pandemic. I began to think that someone should try and capture the stories. I had been considering writing another book, after the Grove Booklet on Mental Health and Young People which was published in 2019, and this felt like the right time to do that. It all came together very quickly in the end.

and what did you discover?

One of the things that really stood out to me was just how fascinating it is to hear the stories of what has been happening. My aim was to gather these but I hope that being given the opportunity to tell the story was encouraging for each of the people I spoke to, and I hope that reading about what others have been doing is inspiring. Some of my favourite stories have included hearing a real life ‘School of Rock’ story of how a youth worker new in post at the start of the pandemic inadvertently ended up taking on the youth band and this has broken down all sorts of barriers; then also the groups running in Cardiff who were given seeds to begin growing in their own gardens or window boxes and who have ended up growing food that the young people never thought they would do, this organisation have been given a ‘secret garden’ in the grounds of Cardiff Castle to create an allotment/garden and I would love to go and see what they’re doing!

Was it all just food deliveries and zoom? 

Of course, across the different organisations there were both similarities and differences. The provision of food in one form or another was a strong theme, as were doorstep deliveries of packages, as was the ubiquitous Zoom. There was a surprising mix of response to using Zoom – some groups had found it almost impossible to engage any of their young people through video conferencing whereas others found that it broke down some of the barriers around accessibility for young people to join in with something they might otherwise have struggled to attend.

I talk in the book about the different ‘ways’ of doing online youth work. I think it’s important to note that online does not always mean video conferencing calls in small groups but can also mean streaming content via Instagram or YouTube, it might mean producing Reels or TikTok videos, Facebook Lives or interaction through any number of gaming platforms or indeed using Discord, which is a 3^rd party chat app, to call friends whilst gaming. There is no question that ‘online’ youth work is now an essential part of our youth work practice and I don’t think we should drop this entirely in favour of face to face, unmediated by screens and servers. A balance is required however, because there is no doubt that human beings were created for eye to eye contact, physical interaction and the warmth of in close proximity community, much of which is impossible with online interaction.

What about outdoor youthwork, wasn’t it safer than inside? 

I also talk about outdoor education or youth work – ostensibly this has been the preserve of the Scouts, Guides plus the myriad of other uniformed organisations and adventure organisations like The Outward Bound Trust. I think this is something we all need to consider, not just because it’ll be the most ‘covid secure’ way of getting together for some time to come, but also because of what someone else recently described to me as the ‘magical idea of young people going for a walk with a trusted adult’. Being outdoors in the natural world is good for us, on so many levels, we’ve been broadly discouraged from being outdoors and seeing other people for the past year and that will have taken its toll on us all, including young people whose residual fitness levels might have dropped through the floor, whose anxiety levels about being outside and possibly ‘bumping into’ other people have gone the other way, right through the ceiling. As a long-time champion of young people’s sense of wellbeing, these things trouble me and while we have the opportunity to begin to think about what our youth work might look like in the immediate future, we ought to be considering these things.

and where can we find your book?

It’s available in Kindle format on Amazon here soon to be available in paperback format too!

Thank you for sharing this Jenni, do buy her book and enjoy reading the experiences of other youth workers in the UK in the last year, in a way its a historical snapshot of youthwoork at this time. From Isolation to Community , how youth workers responded during this time. If Covid has prompted and urged a development of community, in a time when youth work had started to revolve around individuals, case working and certification, then a push to community and awareness of this importance may just be a good thing.