Encountering the mystery

There is new book out published by YTCpress and supported by International Association of Youth Ministry that I have written a chapter on Church on the Edge. Edited by Paul McQuillian in Australia it draws together several key thoughts on as it says on the cover “discovering God with young people in a secular world”

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Streetspace

We have finally decided on the new name for the project Streetspace, (prize to Paul) and we have been given a grant of 5k to help postion the project, for some admin support and activities for the next year. So all being well we should be up and running again soon and back at the indian resturant with the young people through the winter.A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy the movie

Hope

i love this story that Keith posted over at Under the Acacias :-

Pastor Jean-Baptiste tells this story of when he was a teacher in a Christian school:
“There were two Muslim girls in my class. They were intelligent girls, but they would fall asleep in class. I called them to come and chat.
‘Monsieur’, they said, ‘it is because we are hungry.’
I checked out and found there were 20 people in their families with hardly any food. I was given some money and bought their families five sacks of millet. I told them to use the millet for the whole family, but that there was one sack for each girl.
The father of one of the girls thought I wanted to marry her, and that was why I had given the food! I told him that it wasn’t that, but that they were intelligent girls and I wanted them to come to school with a full stomach so they could study.
That girl became a Christian. Today she is the minister for Human Rights in the Burkina government. And she loves Jesus.”

Young Peoples Sunday

Press release Press release Press release Press release

Frontier Youth Trust calls for urgent investment in young people.

9 months of research into the future of Christian Youth Work in England

has culminated in a urgent appeal to Government Ministers to take youth work more seriously and to Denominational heads to motive their Churches to action.

FYT is calling for Churches and Christian organisations to commit 25% of their income on working with young people, particularly marginalised young people, in order to take the needs of those outside of the church more seriously.

‘With the media tending to demonise young people with such negative reporting , many of the general public are afraid to be in conversation with them. Christians need to sloth off their fears and engage with a generation that will soon give up entirely on the church if we are not careful,’ says Dave Wiles, Chief Executive of FYT.

Working in partnership with ‘2009: Year of The Child ’, Frontier Youth Trust is currently developing a FREE resource to assist Churches in celebrating young people in their communities and empowering them to reach their potential. Entitled, Young People’s Sunday, the resource will offer material and tools to help churches celebrate young people throughout 2009.

Church leaders are asked to pledge their commitment to working towards these objectives and specifically respond to the challenges with a firm undertaking to take appropriate action. Churches are also being prompted to lobby politicians to implement a commitment to long term funding of Christian faith based youth work by writing to MPs and Government ministers.

For further information, or to receive a resource pack for Young People’s Sunday, please email frontier@fyt.org.uk for details.

Contact point

Are people aware that contact point

The Ninth Gate release

The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold psp

The Accidental Spy trailer is being rolled out nationally over the next few years. Contact point will have every young person in Englands basic details, such and name dob, address, parents, school, doctor, lead worker ect. It is in response to the report following Victoria Climbie’s death and will automatically update as soon as a parent of yp access a service eg doctor, school, dfes. At one level it will be a great tool for suitable trainned and authorised staff such a youth workers to find out who else is supporting the young person. On the other hand there is no right to privacy for the young person or parents to opt out. There is a sheilding process to protect vulnerable yp from their info being made available, but every yp will be on the system.

Youth Gangs in an English City

A research team, led by Dr Judith Aldridge at the University of Manchester, has found evidence which directly contradicts the core assumptions of government policy on gang and knife crime. Based on two years’ work with members of six gangs in an English city, the research finds that in reality, gangs are loose, messy, changing friendship networks – less organised and criminally active than widely believed – with shifting and unstable leadership. The guardian has published podcast interview online with the researcher. here

The scope of the voluntary youth work sector

The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs one in three of the total voluntary and community sector workforce and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year, according to new research published today by NCVYS and the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations (NCVCCO).

Every Organisation Matters is the first ever mapping of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sectors and was undertaken by a team from the University of Hull led by Professor Gary Craig as part of NCVYS and NCVCCO’s Speaking Out project.

Speaking at today’s launch Deputy Director of Strategy and Communications at the Office of the Third Sector, Juliet Mountford called the research ‘ground breaking’ and thanked the partners for providing an ‘excellent piece of research’. She also announced that Birmingham University will lead the new Third Sector Research Centre dedicated to analysing the impact of the sector’s activities.

Janet Moore, Third Sector Team Leader at the Department for Children, Schools and Families also commended the work and expressed the government’s commitment to taking on board the research findings, to shape future thinking and policy making.

Amongst the report’s key findings are:

The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs over 160,000 people in England – as many as 1 in 3 of all those employed by voluntary and community organisations – and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year.
Small organisations, many of whom work with highly vulnerable children and young people, are under threat because of the government’s shift towards commissioning services.
Children aged 7-13 appear to be poorly provided for, with an emphasis on early years provision and a growing government agenda around services for young people leading to this transitional age group missing out.
Effective understanding of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector is currently hindered by poor quality data.
Voluntary and community sector organisations need to be doing more to measure the long-term impact of their work.

The report calls on the government to invest in further research to better understand the changing nature of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector, to prioritise support for small organisations who often work with those most in need and to provide sustained investment in workforce development.

The research team and representatives from the voluntary sector who attended the launch emphasised the importance of ‘valuing what is valuable above valuing what is measurable’.

For more information and to access the full report go here 100 Tears the movie Code Name: The Cleaner full

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Info via CHYPPS and NCVYS