What is youth action and who are Youth Action Network?

This is my very first blog on our new website and one of what I hope will be very many. It’s great having the opportunity to talk about youth action regularly with our members and anyone else interested in youth volunteering.

So, what is youth action? Well, we describe it by using what we call the nine principles of youth action. But in a nutshell it’s youth-led volunteering. That’s really important because the evidence points to the fact that it’s not as widespread as it could be; and that workers still need support and opportunities to learn from each other about how to move from involving young volunteers and giving them opportunities to take part to supporting them to lead their own projects and activities. Our own youth-led Big Lottery Funded research, published in late 2008, identified a real gap between the aspirations for young people to lead their own volunteering activities and how much this actually happens in reality. Our implementation of Reach with v funded organisations gave us first hand experience of supporting organisations trying really hard to open up the opportunities for young people and v’s own evaluation report highlights this with a clear distinction between youth involving activities (which are happening a lot) and those that are youth-led (a lot less widespread).

So… what can we all do about this? Well, we can all work together for a start, if you’re working with young people and you want to give them opportunities to develop their own volunteering projects you can join our network and start to find out more. We can offer development support, training and networking opportunities to organisations and workers who really want to open things up for their young volunteers. We can also celebrate the good practice that is going on and learn from each other – check out our members’ pages and find out who is doing youth-led volunteering near you, read the YANster reporters’ case studies and read what our young volunteers think about what’s going on across the country.

The very best thing we can do, though, is to look for as many opportunities as possible to support young people to come up with their own ideas and help them to find ways to carry them through to delivery. Support young people to apply for funding for youth-led activity (and there is money out there) and give them space and support in making their ideas real.

What can Youth Action Network do? Well, we’ll take all of your experiences, all of the good practice, the issues, the challenges and the real life stories and share them widely and use them to influence policy makers and funders to recognise that there is a difference between youth involving and youth-led and that the latter often takes a little longer but has amazing results!

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