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Going bush youth work in rural settings.

Article Excerpt
This paper is a reflection on the author's experience as a youth worker in the Western Australian Goldfields towns of Laverton (population 450, 1,000km NE of Perth) and Kalgoorlie (population 30,000, 600km ENE of Perth). While there are things that make youth work in these settings difficult, there is also a richness and holism in youth work practice outside the city. The existence of a real community where people (including decision-makers) actually know each other makes long-term change for young people a real possibility. Living in the community in which you work, and where all your clients know where you live, also raises some interesting issues of accountability, ethics and practice.

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For the past four years, I have been working as a youth worker in rural / remote Western Australia, first, as a youth development officer with the Shire of Laverton, about half way between Perth and Alice Springs, and then as a manager of a suite of youth services in Kalgoorlie, a bit closer to Perth. In both places, youth services were either non-existent or underdeveloped, and both projects involved getting services up from scratch. This paper pulls together some reflections on what makes youth work in these settings different.

The situation for rural young people compared with their urban counterparts is often more different and yet more similar than people might imagine. Generally, the principles of youth work practice should be as applicable to working with rural young people as they are to young people in any other setting. However, there are some features of rural youth work that make it both easier and harder to meet the needs of the young people we serve.

It is probably true to say that for the entire history of youth work, the focus has been on young people in urban situations. Urban life, it has generally been thought, is particularly corrupting of young people, and special interventions are necessary in order to protect them from long-term damage. Youth work has been one of those interventions.

Rural life, on the other hand, is more "natural", and in the mythologies that have, since Rousseau, permeated our understanding of what development means, young people are seen to have a better chance of not being corrupted by the vices and vicissitudes of urban living and of turning out okay. For many social commentators, rural life presented a kind of ideal community, in which everyone knew each other and looked out for each other, people never locked their doors and there was always a welcoming smile in the street. The lack of anonymity may have also meant that some behaviours, such as illegal drug use or promiscuous sex, were more inhibited, and that people lived better lives as a result. Sons and daughters may have found easier pathways to employment than their city cousins in their parents' trade or on the farm.

There is some truth in this picture. I'm not saying that it is idyllic: there aren't living situations anywhere that are idyllic. But rural towns and villages are real communities, rather than "imagined" ones (Anderson 1983); they are constituted by real relationships in which people know each other and talk to each other. Living in a city, I knew only two of my neighbours, even though I had been living in the same house for 10 years. Within a week of moving to Laverton, I knew everyone in the street, had been invited out three or four times, and had met most of the local government councillors, the Shire President and Chief Executive Officer and all the shopkeepers in town.

That density of social connection produces a high level of what social planners have been calling social capital. Social capital, derived from a range of sources, notably Pierre Bourdieu's book The Forms of Capital (1986) and Urie Bronfenbrenner's work on social ecology (e.g. in The ecology of human development (1979), is a function of the number, variety and quality of social relationships that people have in their lives. The amount of social capital that a person has is a major factor in their resilience, their capacity to bounce back when hard times come. It is also a major factor in the health of a community, in the capacity of a community to deal with its own problems, and to use outside assistance in a productive and sustainable way without becoming dependent on it.

It is precisely the lack of these kinds of connections that makes urban or suburban youth work difficult. We talk about working with the community in city-based work, but often the community is more imagined than real. People who live in a particular suburb may know no-one else in the suburb. They may never have met their member of parliament, and probably don't know who he or she is. Shops are likely to be owned by multinationals. Local community workers probably live somewhere else, and drive into work...

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