From Simon Kensdale, Wigan Creative Industries Officer
Virginia Haworth-Galt laments the fact that an arts project for young people could be labelled as ?Cash for Yobs? by the press (ArtsProfessional issue 86, November 15); but a lot of money for young people is allocated from fear rather than from respect or to encourage. When I worked for the youth service I was struck by the amount of money spent on ?disaffected? young people. I felt we would have done better to have focused resources on middle-of-the-road kids. Then, having established buzzy and different projects, we would have been able to reach out to potential troublemakers and say, convincingly, ?Look what you are missing out on?. Instead, we often ended up with small groups of unfriendly young people who were neither responsive nor appreciative. (They learned that this was one way of extorting further support). Although some youth workers prefer ?hard? cases, I was not alone in worrying that we encouraged some young people to act ?hard? (and deny their imaginations) and wasted time with others who were better off left alone ? or left to the police.
Resources will be slow to flow to young people keen on dance in this kind of system. A majority of young dancers will be girls and their interest and ability may even be held against them: they will be perceived as being less likely to cause problems and therefore not worth supporting. As a youth worker, I promoted a lot of dance, but rarely succeeded in getting a senior officer to attend a project, let alone evaluate it. When I left my post, the management was swift to disband the groups I had set up and reallocate resources to ?priority areas?.
Whether we will ever succeed in persuading those who allocate money that dance is more important to human existence than football ? stretching back, as it does to the dawn of social life and not just to the middle of the nineteenth century ? remains to be seen.