One of the tasks youth workers have as educators (yes, we are educators not animators) is bringing them back to reality and often we succeed in that. The purpose of this is to make them active again and by doing so not only solving the problems, which are here and now, but also put them back in the drivers seat.

What is interesting about this is that youth work in times of cuts has the same reflex. It is all the fault of the “enemy” and we are definitely not going to take a hard look at ourselves. The point is that youth work always will be influenced by politics on which youth work has almost no influence. It is called democracy. A majority of the voters wanted to have the budget cuts, plain and simple.

Youth work was not very good in the last three decades in explaining what we are doing and why it is important. Our job was “important”, “all about trusty relationships” and we did “save” young people. No wonder that the outside world looked at us with some healthy mistrust.
Youth work in the countries with the bigger budgets started to get lazy. Youth work starting to attract more and more workers who saw it as just a job and this led to lesser innovation. Youth work did formulate rules, profiles, competence and quality standards. All useful but sometimes we forgot to discuss, analyse and adjust our work, which is very important for a form of work which needs to reinvent itself over and over again