Ever since our founding in 1904, it has been the Association’s mission to grow Yorkshire’s future.
Our mission is to champion good youth work; by delivering it, experimenting with it, promoting it and supporting others who share our beliefs about it.
We help young people in Yorkshire to:
Build their self-confidence and feel proud of themselves.
Identify their goals and aspirations and make progress in achieving them.
Start a business, get a job or get on a course.
Meet new people, make new friends and have new experiences.
Our aims are always to:
Deliver high quality services that young people say matter to them.
Be experimental and innovative in the way we do things.
Help young people to be heard and to be the decision-makers in services that affect them.
Help young people to take the lead in running our Association and to be our trustees.
Form partnerships and alliances with other organisations that share our mission and outlook.
Stick to our long-standing principles and values about how our work should be done.
Develop and preserve the craft of youth work by training new generations of youth workers.
Listen to young people and trust them, be there when they need us and never judge them.
We think that good youth work is a way of understanding young people and the world they live in and approaching things from their point of view. We also think that good youth work is built on a wide set of skills and tools; we see these as the ‘craft’ of being a good youth worker.
We believe that the combined approach and craft of good youth work is something to be defended, supported and developed. A positive future for good youth work is something to campaign for.
- Good youth work creates positive changes in the lives of all young people. It is a constructive process that aims to give young people chances to lead happier and more fulfilling lives. It can be of benefit to all and should not be confined solely to tackling disadvantage; although it will always recognise the disadvantaged starting points society imposes on some young people.
- Good youth work will speak up for young people and always remind adult society that they are most often the victims of society’s problems and not the cause of them.
- Good youth work challenges discrimination and promotes inclusion because it values and celebrates the uniqueness of individuals, championing both cohesion and difference.
- Good youth work is always relevant because it is centred on the needs of young people and encourages them to express those needs. Young people set the agenda for good youth workers.
- Good youth work must be voluntary and its power to grow mutual respect between young people and adults comes from the right to walk away from the youth work process. It must be a positive choice.
- Good youth work enables young people to understand and own their rights and responsibilities as citizens, and how to form and maintain good relationships that are built on self-respect and respect for the rights and responsibilities of others.
- Good youth work is primarily a group process of social education, enjoyed in the most informal and accessible ways. It can help support families and young people’s growth and transition to independent adulthood.
- Good youth work is a powerful force for positive social change and good youth workers, alongside the young people they support, are its best and most credible advocates.
Most of our work is based around six key programme areas, or ‘themes’.
Our themes are growingly being recognised as premium services across our sector, offering well-thought-out, impactful programmes of work, underpinned by theory, delivered in the most effective ways by trained and experienced youth workers.
