National Youth Work Week: Sam Heller
Youth Work Week is an annual week long celebration organised by the NYA celebrating everything Youth Work!
Join us for Youth Work Week 2022 from Monday 7th November to Sunday 13th November. Our theme this year is A Festival of Youth Work.
We encourage young people, youth workers and those who fund, commission or lead youth work to join us in celebrating the positive impact youth work has on young people in the present, and for the future.
To celebrate we are highlighting some of Wirral's fantastic youth workers to help explain their role and the impact they feel youth work has on the lives of young people.
Meet Sam
How did you get started in youth work?
I got started in youth work about 10 years ago, completely by accident. As a young person, I had been accessing the services for many years, and through my freelance work in the arts I found myself working regularly with other young people and peer mentoring them. Which later turned into training and then employment.
What is your role and how do you support young people?
I am the arts coordinator for pilgrim street arts centre. I head up and decide the direction of our arts offer and find new, exciting ways to use our arts offer to engage young people in youth work, as well as putting on events for our young people and their families.
What skills do you feel youth workers bring to supporting young people and how does it differ from other forms of support?
Youth workers bring an all encompassing support for our young people. They’re not afraid to draw on life experiences and go the extra mile for the young people in their care – or at least I know myself and my team do. In our organisation with are all multi-skilled in the art and youth work, so we blend all of our skills together into a melting pot of possibilities and expertise for our youth.
What impact do you think youth workers have with young people?
I can only speak from the experiences I have had. I know that when I was a young person, my youth workers kept me supported, comforted and alive. My youth workers and the spaces they created had been a haven for myself and many of my friends. I know my young people need me the same way I needed my workers, when I was their age.
How do you see youth work evolving over the coming years?
Youth work is constantly evolving, as it should, because our young people are evolving. The old issues young people face are still there, and new ones are created daily for us to tackle.
Youth work should move with the time, pay attention to youth/pop culture, and be influenced by what our young people want as well as what they need.
How do you feel youth workers can support other teams within children’s and wider services?
I believe there should be a greater web of communication of services available. Collaboration and understanding of each other’s work and the young people is the only way we can evolve and progress.
What issues facing children and families currently/ in the future do you see youth workers playing a key role in supporting them through?
The biggest issues for young people these days I believe are; mental health, misinformation and miseducation. I believe that these can be separate but they also go hand in hand. Young people are connected to the internet constantly, receiving untrustworthy information or falsities from online.
They are turning to the internet for answers because they don’t feel like there is anyone they can trust to get this information from.
Mental health concerns are on the rise, young people aren’t happy with the way they are, comparing themselves to impossible people online. Young people are confused, and rightly so. So it is our job to help them make some sense of it.