Community Focus – Getting positive

Virginia Haworth-Galt highlights the potential of some recent youth initiatives.

If you come across any policy relating to young people, the chances are it will have the word ?positive? in it. Actually, there are some alternatives: ?creative?, ?chances?, ?changes?, ?futures? are all pretty popular but ?positive? reigns supreme. Two such initiatives are ?Positive Futures? and ?Positive Images?.

Positive Futures is a national, sports-based, social inclusion programme aimed at marginalised 10?19 year-olds in the most deprived neighbourhoods. It is managed by the Home Office Drug Strategy Directorate with funding of £19m for 2003/06 from the Home Office, the Football Foundation and Sport England. It has garnered attention in the media recently because research by MORI has shown that 91% of the 18,000 young people targeted have found ?meaningful engagement?. The research also revealed that 14,000 of these young people are male. With much of the programme delivered through football, there?s no big surprise there but Positive Futures has pledged to tackle this gender imbalance.

From an arts perspective, youth dance would fit beautifully into this remit and would surely help to even out the gender imbalance. Dance has all the discipline, organisation and career pathways of sports. The scheme talks about leadership skills and mentoring programmes, and opportunities for volunteering, casual and part-time work and routes to full-time employment. Again, this has youth dance written all over it.

In policy terms, Positive Futures has a cousin called Positive Activities for Young People (PAYP). PAYP aims to reduce street crime and anti-social behaviour and support routes back into education, training and employment. It follows on from previous crime-diversion holiday activities (such as SPLASH) but promotes year-long activities. PAYP was anticipated as being delivered by either sports or the arts as preceding schemes had been. In reality, there was no specific allocation for arts activities, and artists and arts organisations had to find their own way around the seemingly complex funding structure. With no specific arts funding allocation, Arts Council England doesn?t have a co-ordinating role in gathering statistics. Consequently it has been unable to build up a profile of which arts activities and which artists have delivered projects to which young people. In youth arts we feel in the dark ? we know arts-based PAYP activity is taking place, but it is very hard for us to find out about it. This lack of clarity is great shame and a missed opportunity as the arts have been proven to deliver across the social inclusion agenda for many years.

Positive Images is a campaign initiated by Young People Now magazine and launched in mid-October. Tessa Jowell is a supporter of the programme and states, ?The media should recognise that young people are their future consumers and they should behave with responsibility when covering young people?s issues.? A draft media code has been created and will be sent out for consultation with journalists, young people and youth groups. MORI (them again) carried out research which showed that a whopping 71% of press articles about young people are negative and only 8% include a quote from a young person.

In the youth arts world we would strongly endorse Tom Wylie?s (Chief Executive of the National Youth Agency) claim that ?Negative reporting creates a climate of fear about young people. It is hypocrisy for the press and politicians to talk about the need for young people to behave more responsibly while acting irresponsibly towards them.? Certainly in youth arts we have often been forced to view media coverage as a poisoned chalice. Many of us have sought local press coverage for a great arts project that has really improved the lives of the young people involved, only to find a headline of a ?Cash for Yobs? nature.

Virginia Haworth-Galt is Director of Artswork, an independent youth arts development agency. e: [email protected];
w: http://www.artswork.org.uk;
w: http://www.drugs.gov.uk/nationalstrategy/youngpeople/positivefutures;
w: http://www.ypnmagazine.com/campaign/index.cfm