Social Networking, "is the same as youth work on the face to face level - you need to build a relationship"

Gillian Elliott is an Area Youth Worker at the Blackbird Leys Youth Centre in Oxford. The Blackbird Leys estate is one of the areas in Oxford that belies the stereotypical image of a mainly privileged University town. Relatively recently the area ranked in the 10% most deprived areas in England with high unemployment and associated crime rates.

Gillian is an experienced youth worker who has recently taken over the centre and working energetically to develop it. She joined the Action Research project to explore how Social Networking could supplement traditional youth work activities. Her aims were to build staff capacity, starting with herself, promote the centre and provide an additional channel for communication with young people, both as a group and individually.

With strong support from Jeremy Dennis, Oxfordshire County Council Youth Support Services web Editor, Gillian set up both a Bebo and Facebook profile, although it was soon clear that Bebo was the more promising site for the users. BBL Youth Centre Bebo profile  The young people were interested and several befriended the site, although they weren’t initially keen to edit or contribute to it – preferring rather to comment on the work done by Gillian and Jeremy. Importantly, the majority of youth club members don't have access to computers at home and instead use the computers at friend's houses and sometimes school. There have been delays in getting the two machines ordered for the centre so access was provided through a two hour session at the local IT hub in the same building.

Reviewing progress three months on Gillian feels she isn’t yet using it as she would wish. This is partly because of the limited access to machines which means that young people tend to use the time for immediate personal communications, MSN and email. Time is the other constraint, with Gillian fully busy developing and running the centre. A work experience student jazzed up the Bebo site and Gillian is planning to continue that support through engaging one of the new staff joining the centre (as a part of a pilot on weekend opening). The site needs to become proactive, posting pictures and films of the group although many member’s immediate reaction has been to, “shout and scream and say they don’t want pictures on the web”.

Once the two machines are installed Gillian plans to allow members “open and easy access” so they can come in and use it regularly. Her biggest hope from Social Networking is easier communication. She is clear though that a Youth Work approach is essential. “It’s the same as youth work on the face to face level, you – I – need to build a relationship through the site to a user group”