How do you like your coffee?
More than one young woman threw the complimentary chocolates into the youth camp fire as a symbolic comment on the commercial activities of Nestle. Others were more reflective, still puzzling over the rights and wrongs of the consumer boycott. Some just ate the chocolates.
The scene was the end of a CAFOD youth camp, at which the skills and methods of youth workers had been focused on consumer culture and consumer power.
The teenagers had taken part in discussions and quizzes on trade and advertising. They split into three groups. Some interviewed the public outside a shopping centre about what they knew or cared about the origins of their purchases. Some visited a fair trade organisation, and others went to question representatives of Nestle at the York head office about fair trade and the promotion of infant formula in the Third World.
Youth worker Barbara Crowther is clear that the programme wasn’t about promoting a line or pushing boycotts, but about letting young people make up their own minds. “We say don’t just believe everything you read from a boycott group. Don’t use your consumer power blindly. Find out, ask questions.”
The methods, settings and values of youth work are particularly well-suited to raising young people’s awareness of global issues, argues a new report. A World of Difference presents the first systematic look at how UK youth workers are responding to the fact that experiential learning about values and choices are at the heart of both youth work and development education.
Local examples abound: a Dagenham youth centre got involved in World Aids Day and work around Comic Relief; a youth group in Coventry devised a play about HIV and performed it in Europe; young people in Bath produced their own ethical consumer guide and a series of bulletins on nuclear power, transport, rainforests, women and freedom.
Such local projects tend to be shoestring operations facilitated by committed workers. But there are also examples of well-funded partnerships. Save the Children and the Guide Association are currently developing a major project using innovative peer education methods to raise awareness of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child with all the country’s 750, 000 Guides. Christian Aid uses its extensive youth networks to promote and campaign about fair trade, Third World debt and cuts in overseas aid.
The youth work curriculum is based on empowerment and the promotion of equality. That gives youth workers the flexibility to explore global issues, and the imperative to do so if young people are to be enabled to make sense of the world and their place in it. The youth work slogan is “to start where young people are”. That is no limitation when everyday items - a cup of coffee or a pair of jeans - can be a springboard to exploration of exploitation and the injustices of the world, and particularly of the power relationship between the countries of the North and the South.
Oxfam’s youth work team points out that youth work has had an explicit anti-racist agenda for many years. “Development education should run through all anti-oppression work done by youth workers,” it argues, emphasising that while youth workers may not be familiar with the term development education, many have been doing it as social and political education.
Researchers undertaking the World of Difference survey found youth workers interested and supportive of development education, but often lacking in recognition and support locally and nationally. The Development Education Association, which commissioned the report, calls for a more co-ordinated national strategy for youth work, with training and support in curriculum development backed by clear national guidelines. It particularly wants to ensure that the views of young people are listened to. Tens of thousands of young people write to aid agencies every year expressing their concern about divisions in the world and asking what they can do to help, the researchers point out.
In the end, action by young people is central to the youth work philosophy. As Martin Drewry of the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs says: “If young people go through five years of awareness raising without the experience of trying to change anything, by implication they may be learning to be powerless. ”
A World of Difference: making global connections in youth work costs Pounds 7 plus Pounds 1 pp from the Development Education Association, 29-31 Cowper Street, London EC2 4AP. Tel: 0171 490 8108