This week’s interviewee works for a youth charity, training and managing the volunteers who mentor and support unemployed young people
“I’m employed by a national charity that works with young people who aren’t in education, employment or training. Accessing funds from local authorities, the Connexions youth service, Jobcentre Plus and other sources, my team runs courses to improve people’s employability and get them into work.
After each course we mentor the young people for up to six months, helping them to pursue training and job opportunities. I’ve spent the last few years recruiting and training volunteers as mentors, so we’re right at the sharp end of what the government calls ‘Big Society’ – and while volunteers can be fantastic, there are also big challenges in supporting them to work with our client group.
Our group of volunteers is quite mixed, and that’s great because we have a bank of people with different life experiences and can match them up with appropriate young people. But we do get quite a lot who are volunteering to enhance their CVs. There’s nothing wrong with that – I first joined this charity as a volunteer, before doing an MA on the impact of youth support services and going professional – but it can mean that people aren’t in it for the long haul. Other volunteers think it’s going to be a fairy story, with the young people always showing up on time and following their advice, and they can end up quite frustrated. All in all I’ve probably recruited and trained more than 100 volunteers, and I’d say a third of them still work with us.
Another problem is the lack of leverage we have: volunteers aren’t under any contract of employment, and it’s difficult to get them to submit regular reports and attend the necessary group support sessions. That’s not what they’re interested in – but when volunteers are working with vulnerable young people, it is very important that we keep a close eye on how things are going.
There can be a problem around boundaries, too. Young people develop a relationship with our mentors, and if they hit a crisis – if they feel suicidal or depressed – they may get in touch. Volunteers don’t have all the skills and knowledge to handle that. Our policy is that mentors should signpost them to professional services, but sometimes the boundaries get blurred and volunteers try to solve the problem themselves. We’re quite strict about monitoring what’s going on – but if the young person’s over 18, it can be difficult to enforce our policies.
If the Big Society is just about increasing the number of volunteers, I’m not sure that it would be a cost-effective way of achieving good outcomes in our field; after all, it costs money to train volunteers and they can be unreliable, whilst professionals have a wealth of knowledge and skills. So my organisation is moving in the other direction, making more intensive use of a smaller number of volunteers: that addresses some of the problems around reporting, boundaries and expertise. The use of volunteers should never be the sole available intervention: it should be one option amongst a range of things, including referrals to statutory services and working with other key professionals.
With all that we learn about these young people, we can help statutory agencies – our clients may open up to volunteers more than to professionals. Yet while the statutory agencies are moving towards taking a more integrated approach to youth support, it’s not clear how we fit in; our volunteer mentors aren’t invited to inter-agency case meetings, for example. Those public-voluntary sector relationships may need to change if the Big Society idea is really going to work; for example, a memorandum of understanding could outline how the two sectors should work together. It would also help if we raised the profile of our volunteers by giving them formal training that leads to accredited qualifications.
At the moment, of course, funding is very tight; a lot of the smaller organisations that refer people to us don’t know whether they’ll exist after next April. And we already have a problem with helping those aged 19-plus: there’s still lots of training, education and advice services for 16-18 year-olds, but when you hit your 19th birthday, they disappear. Yet that’s often the age at which people are ready for intervention: they’re bored of being bored, and have realised they need to sort themselves out.
Perhaps our biggest problem, though, lies in turning all this support into permanent employment. A lot of young people spend years doing various courses, but there’s a link missing in the chain: if youth support services are to tackle what could be called a cycle of dependency, they need to work more closely with employers. That means building relationships with companies; helping employers to take on people with fewer skills; supporting traineeships and apprenticeships. This is a big, fat issue: the youth labour market is dire, and unless we can make it easier and more attractive for employers to take on people with criminal records, low levels of qualifications or a background of long-term unemployment, then these people will carry on going round and round doing employment courses forever.”