Youth Development Management is managing organizations and activities that are focusing on young people, such as youth programs, youth projects, volunteers, youth centers, youth organizations, and clubs. Youth Development Management includes leading and organizing human resources, financial resources, facilities, and activities to achieve identified youth development goals.

The current social context determines the aims and general goals of youth work. In all parts of the world, governments and human rights bills highlight young people and emphasize their importance as leaders of the future. This means that investing to manage young people is an investment in managing the country’s future. Because youth are the future decision-makers and workforce, investing in youth work is an investment in the development of the country.

These aims are too broad to be meaningful in terms of managerial goals. A mother may well know that this is the ideological context in which she brings up her family, but it’s not much help in getting her children into goodSchools and good jobs are not possible if the student doesn’t have the funds. This is also true for youth workers. Your work must be clearly defined and you need to target specific things.

Youth development work now plays an important role in official national development efforts. It has helped young people to understand various aspects of society, the economy, and politics, and in many instances has encouraged young people to play an active role in their societies. Examples are the work done by National Youth Leagues and Youth Advocacy Groups.

 

Management tasks of youth development workers

Here are some of the most important management tasks of youth development workers. You:

• Mobilize scarce human, physical and financial resources
• Co-ordinate activities
• Take part in various operations
• Seek to generate change

 

All of these activities have a management component:

• Constantly reassess your purpose and direction
• Review available resources
• Monitor your efficiency and effectiveness.

A youth development worker has many roles. In many organizations, there is only one youth development worker. Sometimes youth workers are volunteers or part-time staff. In all these cases, the youth development worker plays the role of both management and support staff – that is, s/he is both the manager and implementer of programs.

Youth development workers include (Cattermole et al, 1987): 

• Those who work directly with young people
• Those who work in communities
• Those who work with other staff
• Those involved in administration and finance
• Those who are concerned with policy implementation and resources.

 

Guidelines for improving the quality of youth development work management

The guidelines that follow are additional practical suggestions for improving the quality of your managerial youth development work.

This section (adapted from Cattermole et al, 1987) provides some useful guidelines on how to perform your management role as a youth development worker. They should be useful to you whether you work in a small or big organization.

• Define clearly the tasks you must complete. You should devise your activities and goals by using objective criteria, not merely a feeling of what should be done.
• You must carefully identify the parameters of your own agency – that is, its area of operations. You should know which activities should be done by the agency you operate in and which are best done by other agencies. You need to be honest about this. It is also necessary for staying on track with the activities and goals at hand. In some organizations, the parameters are already clearly defined. In others – especially new organizations – it’s important to do this so that duplication of activities is avoided.

Once the tasks appropriate to the organization have been identified, they should be examined against the background of:

• The agency’s overall strategy
• Its aims and purpose
• Resource constraints
• Potential threats to efficiency and effectiveness.

This will help you prioritize and organize these tasks.

Once you are clear about priorities, you have the task of convincing your colleagues (on the same, higher and lower levels) of the overall strategy and its component activities. Clarity of priorities will enhance your critical management skill of gaining power and influence among your colleagues.

The next step is to quantify the resources needed for your program. Resources are scarce. One of your most important tasks. As a manager in development work is to use resources to achieve the best possible results with the lowest cost and human resource input.

You need to be satisfied that the project is progressing well, and this goes hand in hand with appropriate training, support, and supervision of staff. The skill of solving problems creatively includes the steps of evaluation and implementation of solutions collectively with staff, and these also provide opportunities for feedback and gaining acceptance of the project and its activities by all stakeholders.

As the manager, you are also responsible for monitoring and evaluating the program. You should make sure that policymakers and staff are aware of the importance of project evaluation. It’s also your job to ensure that the evaluation is carried out effectively and the results implemented in order to improve the quality of the program. This will enable you to make informed decisions on the future of the project because the evaluation helps to answer the following questions about the program:

• Should it be maintained without change?
• Should it be maintained with adjustments?
• Should it be transferred to another agency?
• Should it be terminated?

 

You should note that the results of the evaluation might not be accepted. by everyone, but it is your role as the manager to negotiate the implementation of the results of the evaluation and to constantly review and improve the situation as emphasized in the spiral problem-solving model we discussed earlier.

These tasks are not easy. This is one of the reasons why effective communication skills and time management and critical path analysis are so important. In thinking about and discussing these issues, you should always keep in mind that the question of skills is just one of several major issues in youth development work. According to Smith (1988, p. 78), the issues of ‘identity’ and ‘orientation’ need to receive attention as well. This boils down to the extent to which you, as a youth development worker, identify yourself as a manager and orientate yourself in that direction. Usually, the face-to-face workers know that they have a responsibility to manage their own interventions with youth so some of the questions they will ask will be about ‘purpose’ and ‘process’. The person managing the administration is also a youth development worker, but someone with those responsibilities will be more interested in ‘procedures’ than ‘process’.

 

Author: Anso Kellerman