Training the “Wizards”: A Model for Building Self Efficacy and Peer Networks Among Urban Youth Workers

This article presents a community's efforts to address the professional development needs of frontline youth workers. A coalition designed a 13-week Youth Worker Training Institute to increase youth workers' knowledge, skills, self-efficacy, and professional networks. After the Institute, participants reported feeling more skillful, connected to other youth workers, confident, professional, reflective, and being more powerful change agents. Based on results from this formative evaluation, we suggest that it was multiple teaching and learning strategies that promoted reflection, peer learning, and networking—that contributed to youth workers gaining knowledge and skills that in turn increased their confidence and sense of self-efficacy.     

Chapter IV: Child Welfare Education:

No abstract available for this article.     

Chapter 10. Children and Youth

Abstract

It is impossible to make global generalisations about children and youth from a phenomenological inquiry into the experiences of such a limited number of participants in just one city, Limerick, Ireland, and one case, St. Augustine's. The goal of phenomenological research is, however, not to seek generalisations but to expose the individual case, so I have endeavoured to use a symptomatic rather than representative approach to risk biographies, in so far as we assume all biographies are composed of the partial perspectives of knowledges that are insider and situated. Truths are contingent on differences of time, space, age, gender, class, sexual preference, and other aspects of culture and context. Nonetheless, I am reminded towards the conclusion of this book of a comment made by well-known Irish economist, T. K. Whittaker (1997), who observed: “If we think about it, save for the vagaries of birth, errant biology, class and status, or simply circumstance, we are all but a half step away from the 'other' families we describe as in need of service, or 'at risk.' In the final analysis, it is not 'us' and 'them.' It is all of us. Together” (p. 138).     

Chapter 10. Patterns of Career Development in Child and Youth Care

Abstract

Patterns of career development in the field of child and youth care are reexamined in relation to roles that involve working directly with children in specific settings as well as in relation to roles that involve working indirectly in support of children through working with other adults, be these parents, other caregivers or professionals. Other career roles involve working in support of human service systems that impact on the care of children and young people and influence family welfare. Finally, some career roles involve working at the macro level to formulate policies that shape the culture of caring communities to support the health and well-being of children. Each career role presents important challenges and offers valuable opportunities for influencing the lives of children, young people and their families.     

Chapter 2. From Risk to At-Risk

Abstract

The American economist, Frank Knight (1921), introduced risk as far back as the early 1920s with his analysis of profit legitimisation. In the profession of law, by the latter part of the 19th century risk had entered into mainstream social law in Europe (Ewald, 1991). Risk discourse seems to have regained popularity since the 1970s. Despite the voluminous work published since then with over three thousand books and articles by the end of the 1990s (Renn, 1998) there is no consensus regarding the risk construct itself, as it is approached from so many differing perspectives and disciplines. Many researchers tended, when writing about risk and children and youth, to focus on single variables such as intense interparental conflict that exacerbates maladjustment in children. This has now changed since the introduction of population health child and youth care perspectives. We are now far more interested in co-occurring adversities and the total, or whole, environment of a child. This chapter explores how and why a child or youth might be considered at risk exploring educational environments, the world of insurance, the natural world, medical discourse, and the world of the individual.     

Finding Identity in Family Work

SUMMARY

The family has always enjoyed an elevated status in Ireland, yet it was not until the mid-1990s that family-based intervention work really found expression in a new division of child and youth care: community child care-workers. This paper introduces readers to an area of child and youth care work in Ireland devoted to an ecological understanding of the child “at risk” and working with the child and the child's family outside of a residential or institutional setting. The paper includes a brief interview with a community child care-worker, observations from a master's student in social care who has also worked in community child care, and concludes by reviewing 12 key areas community child care-workers must address if their status is to be secured in the Irish child and     

Families in multi-problem situations: Backgrounds,characteristics, and care services

The article reviews practical experiences and theoretical reflections from the Dutch child and youth care sector on the provision of care for families with multiple problems. Emphasis is laid upon the complex relations between socioeconomic and psychosocial problems, and subsequent issues that may arise in arranging child and youth care. Furthermore, the current state of discussion in program development for the target group in the Netherlands is introduced. The originally English concept of families with multiple problems has been used only modestly in German-speaking countries. This is remarkable from an international perspective, especially considering the re-emerging prominence of social policies that define families as a site of social work practice in English-speaking countries. We conclude that the themes, as derived from our review open up possibilities for further international comparisons, and can provide valuable reference for the transnational discourse about child and youth care services for families with multiple problems.     

How “godparents” are made for “unaccompanied refugee minors”: an ethnographic view into the training of future youth mentors

There are many qualitative studies on interactions and activities within mentoring, including on organizational processes. This article concentrates on one pivotal aspect regarding the “doings” of mentorship—the training of future voluntary mentors (known as "godparents") for separated young refugees in a pilot program. The underlying study looks at knowledge production in mentoring. The explorative research done in Austria started during the so-called refugee crisis in Europe in 2015. Using data from participant observation, the “triangle of godparenthood” is reconstructed as a core structure underlying the overall pilot program. Thus the ideal-type figures of the “family-like,” the “professional,” and the “committed contractual” godparent become visible. The interpretation discusses youth mentoring as a form of social problems work. Accordingly, the study shows how social protection is organized based on particular social problematizations and on the construction of voluntary mentors from civil society. The training “teaches” future mentors what kind of young people their counterparts are. It offers a problematization according to which particular “needs” are defined. This allows mentors to legitimize, rationalize, and moralize what is, in the end, a pedagogical approach. By relating the problematization to a personal level, the training provides future mentors with a particular idea and moral obligation regarding what they personally can be for those young people who are categorized as “unaccompanied refugee minors.”     

The listen to me project: Creating lasting changes in voice and participation for children in care through a youth-led project

In this article, we present the results from a youth-led project on the voices and participation of children in state care in Ontario, Canada. The purpose of this project was for youth to share their voice about what they wish child protection workers and agencies could do to improve their experiences within the child protection system. Many youth in care in Canada and internationally report that their voices are not heard and that they are not involved in decisions involving their care. Seven themes were extracted from this voices of youth project asking child welfare workers and agencies to listen to [them] and believe [them], keep [them] informed and be honest, involve [them] in decisions, support [them], keep [them] connected,; ignite [their] passions, and don't give up on [them]. Suggestions from the youth involved in this project are offered on ways to create true and meaningful change in child welfare.     

Our kids: Unaccompanied minors and the question of care

The question of care and what it means both conceptually and practically in the designated arena of child and youth care is a vexing one in the 21st century. Without a doubt, there are increasing numbers of young people who are either demonstrably in need of care or perceive themselves to be either lacking adequate care or simply existing outside those social spaces where care is available. Perhapsthere is no better exemplar of the contested set of relations that is contemporary childhood than those young people traversing national borders. Some of these young people travel with family members, but an ever-increasing number travel unaccompanied by parents or any other form of adult relation. Of these, a group particularly at risk are those without legal documentation. We would argue that this group of young people is urgently in need of our attention as child and youth care workers and scholars.