By Mark A. Mattaini, DSW, ACSW, and Christine T. Lowery, PhD, MSW
Youth Development Workers
Youth development workers work directly with young people, often in small groups. They often are employed in organizations like Boys & Girls Clubs, community centers, and settlement houses. Youth development workers collaborate with youth, families, and other staff in creating and carrying out recreation, service, arts, and learning projects. These projects identify and nurture the unique gifts and talents of each young person, and assist youth individually and collectively to find and “grow” their power.
An effective youth development worker is creative, energetic, and has an unshakeable belief in the potential of every young person to achieve great things and make real contributions to their community.
The work emphasizes reducing exposure to risk factors (for example, networks of peers who are deeply involved in gang activity), and increasing exposure to protective factors (for example, prosocial peers and stable, caring adults).
Shared power undergirds work with youth. Teacher-learner collaborations in which everyone learns from one another and strong skills in group dynamics support a culture of shared power. An ability to non-defensively acknowledge and dialogue with youth about oppressive structures and conditions in their lives nurtures trust. Strong case advocacy skills are useful for supporting youth and their families in challenging environments.
Prevention Worker
Youth development workers work directly with young people, often in small groups.—including youth themselves—in creating projects that reduce behaviors and conditions that lead to poor developmental outcomes: substance abuse, violence, harassment, depression, and child maltreatment, among others. Prevention workers facilitate an environment of shared power.
The work begins by convening groups of stakeholders (often including agency staff, parents, youth, educators, religious leaders, community members, and representatives of the business and law enforcement communities). The group assesses needs and resources, identifies goals, plans and implements programs and evaluates their impact.
The social worker brings specific skills to each phase of that process, while also encouraging a commitment to shared contribution and shared responsibility among those involved. An additional responsibility is identifying and soliciting the financial, political and human support required for program implementation.
The most effective prevention programs are those that are deeply rooted in the local community, are consistent with local values, and can be maintained over the long term with readily available resources; rigid or expensive programs usually do not survive. Designing effective programs consistent with these guidelines requires considerable creativity, blending knowledge of the prevention research with knowledge of local conditions and assets.
Resilience-Oriented Counselor
A key role for professional social workers is that of counselor. This role may be enacted with a variety of titles including counselor, therapist, clinical social worker, and others. The core function of this work, however, is resilience-oriented counseling, conducted in the context of a collaborative shared-power relationship.
The social work counselor may work with youth individually or in groups, and with families. Counseling goals are individualized, but generally involve decreasing exposure to risk factors, increasing exposure to protective factors, reducing problem behavior and supporting positive action on the part of youth. Examples include improving family communication and relationships, building positive peer networks, assisting youth in problem-solving and in gaining access to resources, working to resolve school problems, and dealing with emotional struggles.
Many of the problems young people experience are rooted in impoverished, difficult and even dangerous social and physical environments. Assisting them may require work in the home or neighborhood, accessing alternative experiences or living situations, and advocacy to obtain adequate services.
Another critical function for the resilience-oriented counselor is assisting youth to recognize, cope with, and in some cases confront the larger social, cultural and political forces that may be involved in their difficulties.
Community Builder / Community Organizer
One particularly exciting emerging professional role for social workers with an interest in youth development is community building and community organizing. The research shows that young people flourish in flourishing communities, but in recent years it has become clear that they can also contribute in major ways to strengthening those communities.
The focus of the social worker in these efforts is capacity-building, assisting youth and others in the community to plan, implement and evaluate projects that enhance the social and physical environment. Community-building projects range from surveying community needs and assets to organizing for social justice.
Other possible projects include neighborhood violence prevention efforts, development of community gardens, designing public murals, and a wide range of service projects for children, the elderly, or the community at large. Social workers in these efforts are knowledgeable about and skilled in developing strong social bonds, enhancing civic culture, and working collaboratively with diverse groups, as well as in engaging and supporting the power of youth in their participation in these efforts.
This work requires persistence, creativity—and often courage! Abilities to effectively negotiate bureaucracies and evaluate projects on the fly are also critical, because community building projects are often dynamic.
School Social Worker
As one of the central crossroads of life for most young people, schools are a major venue for social work with youth. Many social workers work within the school system, and others work in programs that interface with the schools (school-linked services). These professionals are ideally situated to take a comprehensive view of the developmental trajectory of those youth who are attending school.
In many settings, the primary functions are resilience-oriented individual and group counseling, coordination with families, and assessments and advocacy related to children with special needs. In recent years, however, the professional social work role has expanded dramatically in many sites, and in fact the social worker may be involved in any of the roles discussed above, including community-building, prevention, and socialization projects.
Bullying and harassment prevention projects, for example, are commonly found in the social work portfolio. Increasingly, consultation with teachers, active involvement in classroom management, and involvement in systems redesign have also become part of the role.
As in most social work settings, the school social worker often also assists youth and their families to locate and access needed services from other community agencies, and may be involved in considerable advocacy work.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Association of Social Workers or its members.
