I have been after this clip for ages since seeing a snipet on the telly, and a mate sent it via facebook.
Three Way movie
Torn
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Category Archives: Zzzz … Old Stuff
The scope of the voluntary youth work sector
The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs one in three of the total voluntary and community sector workforce and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year, according to new research published today by NCVYS and the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations (NCVCCO).
Every Organisation Matters is the first ever mapping of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sectors and was undertaken by a team from the University of Hull led by Professor Gary Craig as part of NCVYS and NCVCCO’s Speaking Out project.
Speaking at today’s launch Deputy Director of Strategy and Communications at the Office of the Third Sector, Juliet Mountford called the research ‘ground breaking’ and thanked the partners for providing an ‘excellent piece of research’. She also announced that Birmingham University will lead the new Third Sector Research Centre dedicated to analysing the impact of the sector’s activities.
Janet Moore, Third Sector Team Leader at the Department for Children, Schools and Families also commended the work and expressed the government’s commitment to taking on board the research findings, to shape future thinking and policy making.
Amongst the report’s key findings are:
The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs over 160,000 people in England – as many as 1 in 3 of all those employed by voluntary and community organisations – and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year.
Small organisations, many of whom work with highly vulnerable children and young people, are under threat because of the government’s shift towards commissioning services.
Children aged 7-13 appear to be poorly provided for, with an emphasis on early years provision and a growing government agenda around services for young people leading to this transitional age group missing out.
Effective understanding of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector is currently hindered by poor quality data.
Voluntary and community sector organisations need to be doing more to measure the long-term impact of their work.
The report calls on the government to invest in further research to better understand the changing nature of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector, to prioritise support for small organisations who often work with those most in need and to provide sustained investment in workforce development.
The research team and representatives from the voluntary sector who attended the launch emphasised the importance of ‘valuing what is valuable above valuing what is measurable’.
For more information and to access the full report go here 100 Tears the movie Code Name: The Cleaner full
Info via CHYPPS and NCVYS
Post Christendom
Life is mad at the moment so little time to think or blog, off to the launch of youth work after christendom tomorrow in Brum then leamington spa, with south west travels next week. very much looking forward to holiday at the end of the monthState of Play movie Code Name: The Cleaner rip
Gordon Brown backs skate parks
Gordon Brown is aware of the need for youth facilities in promoting comuunity cohesion and particularly mentions skate parks State of Play buy Click movie download
Highwaymen movie . on the whole this is good news but it still begs the question why do communities usually put them right on the edge of town when most young people dont have transport. Having just taught on community cohesion is worth noting that the government use the word community to conjour up fluffy feelings associated but the reality of funding long term workers to help build communities that reflect the warmth of the word, still remains a long way away.The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie
Guardian article-
According to a new report from the UK’s children’s commissioners, our young people are not becoming increasingly criminal; our society is simply treating them like they are. The report states that whilst crime committed by children fell between 2002 and 2006, the numbers being criminalised went up by over a quarter.
This clampdown might be justified if the offences were actually causing harm. But many young people are now being subject to authoritarian interference before they have actually done anything tangible. They are, for example, chastised for “hanging around” certain areas or wearing hoodies. In Essex, “forward intelligence teams” allow police officers to follow and record young individuals who might engage in antisocial behaviour. Being perceived as a threat, it seems, now constitutes an offence worthy of police intervention.
Moreover, instead of being punished as individuals for specific acts, young people are now being penalised as a homogenous whole. The commissioners’ report criticises mosquitoes, devices which drive all young people away from public areas regardless of what they are actually doing there. The message these generalised “solutions” send is a dangerous one. How can we teach young people not to judge people by the colour of their skin – or dismiss all adults as unworthy of respect – when they are targeted in such a blanket way?
Looking at the media, “British young people” come across as something akin to rats. They’re all the same, and they all need fixing. In 2005, a media survey found that 71% of stories about young people were negative, with one third focussing on crime. But 70% of our young people’s behaviour is not negative, and our perceptions have become skewed.
Criminalising young people doesn’t just lack principle; it lacks pragmatism, because it can perpetuate the problems it’s trying to solve. Putting people into young offender institutions doesn’t “teach them a lesson”, it teaches them new tricks, and encourages them to define themselves as criminals.
The same applies to those young people who suffer from discrimination and stereotypes outside the prison walls. Authority and adults come to be seen as “out to get you”, rather than something to respect.
Discrimination also makes young people apathetic. If a potential employer has already labelled you a troublemaker, what’s the point of applying for the job? If you don’t think the police will trust you when you say that you were merely loitering outside the newsagents to check your shopping list, what’s the point of trying to have an honest dialogue with them?
If you lock young people up – be it behind metal bars or psychological labels – you lock a mindset in. Instead of assuming the negative, we should have better hopes and higher expectations for our young people – we need to have faith in our young people if they are to have faith in us.
Instead of blaming young people for the rise in offences, let’s have the courage to listen to the experts we’ve appointed. Let’s make an effort to see the subtlety behind the stereotypes, and question whether young people really have become more antisocial to the rest of society, or whether society has simply become more antisocial to them.
About this article
This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Monday June 09 2008. It was last updated at 17:53 on June 09 2008
Look again
Dave sent this around the team, I love these sort of things and thought this was great with loads of different uses for talks etc
Women Bishops, Power and change
The debate about the ordination of women bishops in the CoE is being discussed again Rob highlights pro petition and john a case against, and Maggie notes the issue raised in the house.
Having just come out of a day teaching on community organising and change a few thoughts went through my mind. Firstly how the issue of power is so pertinent to many of the anti arguments, the issues of power and control are not explicit in the writing, but bubble under the surface and can be seen by the way names and titles are used, the magic power (as community organisers would call it) as jargon and quotes are couched into the arguments, that bedazzle the reader. Although this can be also seen in some of the pro posts read although to a lesser extent.
The second issue is the general tendency to avoid too much tension and how the strategies for change employed such as petitions are quite weak. There seems to be bit of a lack of imagination in the process for change, (maybe this is why is seems to be taking so long) perhaps because of the avoidance of tension. Creative methods to promote change will need to accept that tension may be caused, but organisers would happily live with this as all action is in the reaction.
Non formal learning
The National Youth Agency has published a new paper exploring the contribution of non-formal learning, and the distinctive contribution of youth work, to young people’s personal, social and emotional development and to their future life chances. It is part of a wider education project being conducted by the Fabian Society, which is investigating ways of narrowing the gaps in educational experiences and outcomes between children from different social and family backgrounds.
Slug fest
86 so far – the number of slugs and snails removed from the veg patch over the past two nights. There was one slug so large when I saw it I thought it was a mouse – at about 5 inches long and two inches thick, it actually made me jump when I first saw it.
Charismatic past and present or coming out the closet
There has been much talk in blog-land of the stuff going on in Florida and John Crowder’s approach to correlations between the effects of the holy spirit and drugs (I might be inclined to call this re-contextualisation in a similar way to how we use Flow, – maybe I am not as on the edge as I thought). One the best posts by far is by zoecarnate The Last Unicorn full which also has nearly all the links you need if you are unaware of what i am toking about.
As well some questions about the methods, much of the criticism is linked to the label of revival being given to this and the lack of impact on the community. There are questions and references made to the Toronto stuff a few years back and again the impact and the outworking in communities was a factor in this at the time.
Now I am an open skeptic, and back when the 1990s was uncomfortably linked to a house church that openly embraced the Toronto blessing. Skeptically I went along to a meeting, and sitting quietly at the back, could not get my head around what was going on and didn’t agree with the antics, so just thought I might as well use the time productively and quietly prayed. My main motivation for skepticism (as someone committed to the wholistic gospel and social justice, and living in a marginalised community) was exactly the same as many have now ie why isn’t this affecting the streets, why not the poor, where is the kingdom outworking?) but as I sat skeptically at the back praying slowly my hands started to heat, until they were what I only describe as vibrating with an intense heat as if on fire. As I went to stand to try and talk about it with a friend, I staggered as if drunk, and all I could say to my mate was “my hands my hands” repeatedly. At which point someone suggested I lay hands on him and as soon as I moved my hands towards him, he collapsed (i didn’t get as far as touching him). This and a few other strange occurrences happened at the time, and the explanation (or word) suggested at the time was that God was loosening some things in me.
In the past few years as I have reflected on that time I have come to understand that I would not be where I am now without those experiences. There was some real loosening, I do feel God implanted a real courage to move out in mission with the community, that I have become aware of in recent months, and that the work I undertake around Flow and the creativity stems from this releasing by the Spirit, and yes it does have an impact on the community, the kingdom. (At the time it did have an impact on the young people I was working with as well and many became Christians and are still pursuing God)
Now how much of that outward impact is due to me being in a place where that is/was my focus i am unsure. Are we expecting God to bypass the church in seeing this stuff happen on the streets, and are we advocating our responsibility by this expectation? What I find interesting is that some/many people who I now see as kingdom activists or emerging church activists, have had charismatic experiences of one kind or another in the past, but have moved on? into more grounded community/mission and do not see a link. Certainly many who comment on the various posts, acknowledge a charismatic background. So although I remain an open skeptic I am very glad the impact that this had in getting the conversation going about the charismatic in emerging circles.