Policies and Procedures - Youth Workin' It

How To Deal With Unacceptable Behavior At A Youth Retreat

January 29, 2013 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

Q: The last time I planned a youth retreat, we had a young person who had completely unacceptable behavior throughout the weekend. It disrupted the entire event, but he had to remain at the retreat center as we didn’t have enough volunteers to take him home and his parents wouldn’t come to pick him up.

What’s the best thing to do if something like this ever happens again?

A: It’s always a shame when one young person spoils things for the whole youth group. There are two steps you can take though to help ensure that if this does happen again, you can deal with it effectively.

1. Have A Youth Behavior Policy In Place

I’m not sure if you already have a youth behavior policy – if not, get one put in place for the retreat ASAP. This would detail some examples of unacceptable behavior so that both your youth and their parents know what’s expected of them.

You’re not going to be able to put together an exhaustive list, but some rules that you may wish to include would be things like:

No alcohol or drugs
Boys aren’t allowed in girls’ rooms and vice versa
No pornography
No weapons
No violence

This policy should be provided to both the young people and their parents, also giving an idea of what consequences can be expected. Some behaviors may have a zero tolerance policy, so discovering a weapon would have an automatic consequence of the youth being sent home.

Other behaviors may result in warnings, such as a verbal warning, then a reminder warning, then being sent home. This gives the young person an opportunity to correct their behavior and shows that you’re fair in how you deal with situations.

Read this post for more ideas on how to deal with youth behavior and putting the policy in place. In particular, make sure both the young people and their parents sign an agreement to the behavior policy in advance of the youth retreat. This means they know for certain what will and won’t be accepted.

2. Have A Youth Removal Team

As you mentioned in your question, you had no way of taking the young person home following their unacceptable behavior. It can be hard getting enough volunteers to help with a youth retreat in the first place, so you often can’t spare any to take a young person home, particularly as this might mean that you’d have unsafe ratios.

The solution to this problem is to have a youth removal team in place beforehand. This would consist of two or three volunteers who aren’t at the retreat, but who are on call to come to the retreat center in the event that you need them to take a young person home.

For child protection, we’d recommend having two people take the young person home, at least one of which should be the same sex as the youth.

Having this team in place will help ensure that there is minimal disruption to the youth retreat and means that the rest of your youth group don’t miss out on an exciting weekend due to the behavior of just one person.

Question: Have you ever had to send a young person home from a youth retreat due to their behavior? How did you deal with it? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

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10 Ways To Recruit, Manage And Maintain Volunteers

November 13, 2012 By Shae Pepper Leave a Comment

Q: I have a hard time getting and keeping volunteers – they either flake out or burn out. Do you have any tips?

A: Recruiting, managing and maintaining volunteers can be a daunting task. Sometimes you have people banging down your door to help, but that’s not usually the case because you don’t work with the cute little kids or the cool college age students… you work with the tweens (‘between elementary and high school’ i.e. middle schoolers) and teens.

We’ll unpack these areas more in the coming weeks, but for now here are some easy tips for recruiting, managing and maintaining volunteers for your youth work:

3 Tips For Volunteer Recruitment

Tell stories – Share positive stories with people about what good things are happening in your youth work or ministry. Everyone loves a good story or vision to get behind.
Make volunteering organized – Be organized when it comes to schedules and rosters for volunteers. Everyone loves clear, direct information.
Make volunteering easy – Be ready for potential volunteers to apply and have application packs prepared, easy to complete and get back to them in a timely manner. If you say you need help, be ready to get people involved ASAP. Everyone loves to feel needed.

3 Tips For Managing Volunteers

Have clear expectations – Have a clear volunteer policy or ‘job description’ that outlines your expectations. Your volunteers will then know what to expect when they get into it.
Get feedback – Meet with your volunteers after sessions so they can know and share immediately what they think worked well and what didn’t. This shouldn’t take long, so they won’t get burned out by long meetings after a session.
Meet regularly – Meet with your entire team regularly – weekly, monthly or quarterly depending on your organizational and volunteer needs. That way, they feel like they’re part of the team and ‘in the know’ about everything happening currently and in the future of the youth programming.

3 Tips For Maintaining Volunteers

Give them breaks – Schedule breaks and sabbaticals into your volunteer job description or policy so they know they will be able to have a break.
Be professional and reliable – Treat them professionally by being on time for meetings and sessions, calling them, making sure they have their resources and valuing their input.
Incentivize them – Give them incentives in the form of training, particularly with useful and transferable skills like computer skills, people management skills and youth work skills. This can help make up for the fact that they aren’t getting paid, but can still build up their resume or CV.

Here is a bonus tip which applies to each step in recruiting, maintaining and managing volunteers:

APPRECIATE THEM

Find ways to thank your volunteers through calls, texts, cards, dinners, gifts, coffees, recognition nights, opportunities for growth/development etc. Whatever you can do to let them know you value them will go a long way in making sure they get involved and stay engaged for the long haul.

Find out from your volunteers how they feel most appreciated and then do that for them. This doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money, but it will cost you time. The investment of time is well worth it though when you have a team of committed and happy volunteer youth workers.

Question: What tips do you have for recruiting, managing and maintaining volunteers in your youth work or youth ministry? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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What Is Anti-Oppressive Practice?

October 30, 2012 By Shae Pepper Leave a Comment

Q: I’ve heard about something called ‘anti-oppressive practice’ – what exactly is that?

A: Simply put, anti-oppressive practice in youth work is working in a way with young people that actively fights oppression that they may be experiencing through ageism, racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination.

However, it goes beyond simply ‘not discriminating’. It includes action. You, as a practitioner, have to see the forms of discrimination firstly that your youth might be experiencing, and then you have to actually do something to challenge and change the rules, laws and other systems that may be causing the discrimination to be ongoing and a genuine barrier to advancement in the lives of your youth.

Below is an excerpt from the final assignment of the Anti-Oppressive Practice module I took during my MA in Youth Work and Community Development. If you’d like any of the bibliographical information please contact us.

Members of society experience unfair discrimination every day. Sexism, racism, and disabilitism to name just a few. What is the difference between being discriminated against, and being oppressed? Oppression is internalized, making it deeper and more systemic. According to Friere, oppression is the “dehumanization” of people, or at the very least stopping them from fully realizing their full “humanization,” or “vocation” in life. He goes on to say that “[humanization] is thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression and the violence of the oppressors.” (1999:25-26) My understanding is that oppression is using the perceived or actual power within a relationship to maintain control over a person, the situation or circumstances. One is actively encouraging the superiority of some to the detriment of others, working to maintain this level of power in the relationship, as the status quo.

“Youth work confronts Socrates’ question, ‘How should one live?’ which is both singular and plural in the sense that it asks, ‘How should I live?’ as well as, ‘How should anyone live?”

Williams 1993 in Young 2006:3

As a youth worker, I agree with Williams. My responsibility is to help young people participate in “moral philosophizing” (Young 2006:3) about the world around them. This is achieved through discussion and dialogue with people. Friere argues that you can’t have good praxis without “the word…within [which] we find… reflection and action.” If one doesn’t express their ideas through action, “the word is changed to idle chatter [or] verbalism”, but if action is committed without reflection “the word is converted to activism…action for action’s sake,” which “makes dialogue impossible.” (1999: 68-69) Therefore, I must be a worker of words, action and reflection to truly help young people achieve their full role in society.

As a reflective practitioner I feel I must ask Socrates’ question “How should one live?” and transform my practice with the answer. This requires recognizing oppression in all its forms, understanding power relationships between people, empowering the powerless, speaking and acting on behalf of the voiceless and challenging system forms of oppression. I must go beyond discrimination – the outward symptoms expressed in society – and challenge the root of oppression on all levels.

Next week, we’ll continue this topic by exploring Thompson’s PCS (Personal, Cultural and Structural) model for analyzing power relationships and helping you recognize possible areas where your youth might be experiencing oppression.

Question: How would you answer the question “What is anti-oppressive practice?” Would you add or take anything away from what’s been written above? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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Should You Let Your Young People Smoke?

September 7, 2012 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

Youth and smoking — Should you let youth in your programs smoke?

“Sometimes doing the right thing, ain’t doing the right thing”

Nothing like some hard truths from the 2003 Colin Farrell movie, SWAT.

Sometimes youth workers have to make hard choices and what seems like ‘the right thing’ isn’t always ‘the right thing’.

Youth and smoking. This is one of those topics that can lead some youth workers to have moral dilemmas. On the one hand, you don’t want to encourage youth to break the law and you want them to be healthy.

On the other hand, sometimes smoking isn’t the root issue. By not allowing them to smoke, you might be keeping them from your youth work program and thereby not helping them with any of the issues, of which smoking might be the least damaging.

When I worked in the UK, we allowed our Year 10 youth to have set smoke breaks during our six-hour long program. Technically, they were too young to legally smoke. However, they were already doing it – at school, at home and out with their friends. They were allowed one break in the morning and one in the afternoon.

It was the opinion of our organization, and me as the program coordinator, to accept youth where they were at. This was so that we might later have the opportunity to speak into their negative behaviors like swearing, smoking, anger issues, etc.

Often, being in our group sessions and exploring personal relationships and social/emotional skills caused stress that youth often needed a break to escape from. Their coping mechanism was smoking when they were stressed. By allowing them a smoke break, we provided a structured and supervised time for their behaviors and were able to talk with them about that lifestyle choice in a more relaxed atmosphere. I often had some of my best, most personal and vulnerable times with youth while on their smoke breaks, as they reflected on their feelings from group.

It’s not the choice I would make for every group and I would certainly monitor youth that didn’t smoke before the group started. We also provided information to parents to let them know that we did allow smoking during our sessions and that they were welcome to ‘opt-out’ of that for their youth if they desired.

I often found that ‘doing the right thing’ of banning smoking, wasn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for my youth.

Question: How about you? Do you allow smoking at your youth program or club? Do you have other moral dilemmas that come up in your work? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

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How To Create A Youth Group Permission Slip

July 4, 2012 By Stephen Pepper Leave a Comment

Youth group permission slips — Get the green light from parents for special trips and activities

If you’re organizing a youth retreat, lock-in or some other kind of trip, you’ll need to create a youth group permission slip. This should then be completed by the parent or guardian of each young person who’s taking part in the activity or trip.

This completed youth group permission slip gives you, as the name suggests, permission to take their child on the trip and provides you with any important information that you’ll need.

The extensiveness of information gathered on the permission slip will vary depending on what you have planned – if you’re taking young people away for the weekend on a youth retreat, you’ll need more information than if you were to take them ice-skating.

There are three steps to creating a youth group permission slip:

1) Youth information

Here are 12 pieces of information you may need about each young person

Young person’s name
Date of birth
Address
Parent’s name
Phone number for parent(s)
Other emergency contact name and phone number
Medical information (e.g. any medications they’re on, allergies, whether they have epilepsy, etc)
Dietary requirements (vegetarian, gluten free, lactose intolerant, etc)
Health insurance company they’re covered with
Policy number
Family physician
Family physician phone number

This list covers important information you need to know, but there’s another element you need on the youth group permission slip……..

2) Parental Permission

At the bottom of the slip, include some further wording such as the following:

I give permission for my child to take part in (whatever the activity or trip is) and agree that the leadership team (or youth work organization) will not be held responsible for any injuries or illnesses that my child sustains during the (activity or trip).

I hereby authorize an adult leader of the (activity or trip), as an agent of myself, to provide routine health care (including over-the-counter medication such as ibuprofen), administer prescribed medications and seek emergency medical treatment, if deemed necessary by said adult leader.

In the event that I cannot be contacted in an emergency, I authorize the physician or hospital selected by the leader to provide treatment, including hospitalization, for my child.

3) Signature

Finally, the permission slip needs to have a section at the bottom that the parent signs, states their name and provides the date they did this.

If you’re planning a youth retreat, we have a youth retreat permission slip template to download (along with more than a dozen other documents) with a copy of our book. Find out more about How To Plan A Youth Retreat or buy from Amazon using the link to the right.

Question: What other information do you include on a youth group permission slip? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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