The multidimensional relationships of the youth worker with young people

Abstract

Youth work promotes the development of young people (Declaration of the 2nd European Youth Work Convention, 2015). It emancipates young people, enabling them to take a far more active role in their communities. Youth work aspires to promote justice, diversity, and human rights (Schild et al., 2017). All this can be achieved through the relationship built between the youth worker and young people. This relationship is a very important tool in youth work. In this profession, youth workers adopt multiple roles, and therefore the relationship they build with the youth is a multidimensional one by nature. Throughout this study, I am analysing and investigating the multidimensional facets of the relationships between youth workers and young individuals. In this qualitative study, five youth workers that work within Agenzija Zghazagh, the Maltese National Youth Agency which gives young people the opportunity to develop holistically through their multiple empowerment programmes (Our Agency – Agenzija Zghazagh,2022), participated in semi-structured interviews. Through the semi-structured interviews, five prominent themes emerged. These are: the relationship between the youth worker and young people, the youth worker as an educator, the youth worker as a friend, the youth worker as a counsellor, and the youth worker as a parent.