The importance of offline interactions for trust and relationship-building in youth work

I wrote this essay as a formative assignment in the first year of my part-time MA Applied Anthropology & Community & Youth Work. The essay question was ‘Do digital and social media bring us together or drive us apart?’

 	It is a sunny Thursday afternoon in London, around 3 P.M. I am sitting in my living room in front of my tablet, surrounded by throat lozenges and awaiting a call back from my GP to confirm that I have tonsillitis and need antibiotics. A few minutes past 3, the WhatsApp video call notification pops up. I connect to the Poetry Night no less than 2000 kilometres away at the youth centre in Baia Mare, Romania. There it is 5 P.M. and… snowing - April weather. A volunteer briefs me that there are about 30 attendees, some are volunteers, some are members, and some are neither. He places me on a table at the back of the room and, when my turn comes, I introduce myself as the little person inside the phone, explaining, as much as my aching throat allows me, who I am and why am I there. I am slightly nervous that my virtual presence will compromise the feeling of safety in the physical space (at the youth centre). However, when I notice that all the volunteers are enthusiastically waving at the camera and shouting ‘Helloooooooo!’, it feels that I have been integrated into the setting. I cannot fully participate in the getting-to-know-each-other games or the prompt-based writing exercise - partly because I cannot speak and partly because I am not physically there - but, I do manage to read a couple of short stories and, at the end, I promise to host a full creative writing workshop when I visit and join the next Poetry Night online as well; this is received with excitement.

Literature is one of my biggest passions (and my bachelor’s) so when the volunteers announced that they were planning a Poetry Night, I immediately offered my support and within minutes I was already chatting with one of the young organisers. However, reaching this kind of relationship with ‘the new generation’ of DEIS volunteers has been a process. In this essay, I will be describing my experience building trust with the young team focusing on whether digital and social media bring us together or drive us apart.

Building trust

Although I am far away from my hometown, I love getting involved with projects and events - it is my way of thanking the youth workers for the pivotal role they played in my personal and professional development during my teenage years and beyond. In 2019, when I moved away from Baia Mare, it was almost natural for me to be active in group chats and attend meetings as a laptop or phone on a table. Most of the volunteers knew me and if someone new joined in, they were quickly clued in on who I was. Throughout 2020 and 2021, the youth centre was mostly closed due to COVID-19 restrictions, so while ‘the old generation’ was graduating and moving out of the town, there were no new entries. When the youth centre was safe to reopen post-pandemic, DEIS had to recruit volunteers so that approximately ninety-five per cent of the team was brand new. Without an already practised majority to phase in the newcomers and with almost two years of chaotic online schooling and prolonged isolation, ‘the new generation’ went through a completely different integration timeline. My position was also quite different - while ‘the old generation’ viewed me as one of them, a colleague, as we watched each other grow, ‘the new generation’ perceived me directly as an adult and a ‘Youth Worker’. The power dynamics, the novelty of the entire situation, as well as the fact that ‘[online youth work] is also likely to be less successful than interventions with young people that are already known to youth workers’ (Melvin, 2019:184), were all barriers to my digital engagement with the volunteers. One time this distance was clearly visible was when I invited them to follow me on my social media, a few months after they joined DEIS, in the summer of 2022. Some accepted my request right away, but not all of them. I could see that others only accepted it after I spent more offline time with them in December 2022, when I was at the youth centre for a week.

What happened then? The aim of my trip to Baia Mare was to celebrate my grandmother’s ninetieth birthday, but due to plane ticket prices and availability, I booked an entire week. As I had no other plans except for a Sunday afternoon with my family, I spent the rest of my time at the youth centre and hosted a training session, co-facilitated a workshop & consultation event called TDP, and hung out with the volunteers after school. TDP was the first icebreaker, as it gave me an opportunity to ‘[put] young people first and [tip] the balance of power in their favour’ (Coburn, 2010). The atmosphere was more relaxed than the training that I hosted and the format of the activity allowed plenty of informal discussions. We also set up the room together, listening to music and dancing around. In short, the volunteers started to know me better and warm up to me. Hanging out with them afterwards, we played board games, they talked about themselves, and I told them more about me and stories from ‘the old generation’, explaining how I used to be an anxious and confused teenager myself, which they confessed they could not even imagine. The digital interactions after I returned to London shifted remarkably. After having a chance to link a profile picture and a name with the real person, digital and social media have become a way to stay connected with the young volunteers from Baia Mare. Some volunteers started reaching out to me for informal counselling sessions or vocational guidance, they were excited to help me when I asked them for stories that I could use for another academic assignment, and they started interacting with me on social media as well (liking my posts, replying to my stories, etc.). When I attended the Poetry Night, during the break, many volunteers came by the camera to say hello and ask when I was going to visit them next.

On-line and Off-line

In a 2016 article titled ‘Using Facebook as a tool for informal peer support: a case example’, Gandy-Guedes et al. discuss the use of a private Facebook group by seventeen ‘graduates of the same [Master of Social Work] program from the graduating class of 2009’. More specifically,

The Many Faces of Social Work Facebook page was started in April of 2014. The primary focus was to provide a space for several alumnae from the MSW class of 2009 from one southeastern university in the United States of America with a safe and secure space to share their frustrations and obtain support while navigating their particular areas of practice. [...] At inception, the goal was to provide a place within social media, yet not in the public sphere of Facebook, to ask for informal peer support during the workday from colleagues. (Gandy-Guedes et al., 2016:326)

One key feature of The Many Faces of Social Work group was that the members knew each other in real life and ‘[r]espondents expressed how they could not have experienced a high degree of support without an inherent trust of the group’s members’ (ibid.:327). As I was mostly communicating with the volunteer team through text messages, my presence was quite uncanny as they did not yet know much about my personality, whether they could make jokes with me or if I would be easily offended, and, naturally, they felt anxious to reach out to me even when I was offering to advise them on how to use social media and create content for the DEIS pages. Coburn explains that ‘youth work [is] a border crossing practice, where collaborations between young people and youth workers facilitate the creation of new knowledge and ideas’ (Coburn, 2010), however, this bond is highly reliant on mutual trust and a genuine knowledge of the other which I did not manage to build prior to December 2022.

Bradford indicates that ‘[v]irtual, online space should be understood as real but in a different way from material space such as the street, the park or the youth club’ (Bradford, 2012). The material and virtual spaces complement each other, offering certain types of knowledge about a person and different experiences. It is true that the ‘stigmatization of online intimacy’ has decreased and talking about ‘online friends’ does not necessarily ‘certainly occasion significant comment’ (see Hine, 2015:8). However, in the case of ‘person-centred’ work, which is ‘one of the defining features of youth work’ according to Melvin (2019:184), it appears that complete trust cannot be achieved without having met face to face. In my case a physical meeting was necessary, I believe because for DEIS volunteers youth work is bound in material space, but regular video calls might work as well for long-term digital collaboration. Melvin, quoting from Stommel, also adds that youth workers should take approaches that can engage with young people’s ‘… digital selves… [as well as their] … physical selves…’ (Stommel, 2012, cited in Melvin, 2019:190).

Together or apart?

Digital and social media can act both as barriers to engagement and catalysts for collaboration in working with young people. As Melvin highlights,

…the use of digital tools, spaces and places as mediators of youth work practice is most effective as an extension to existing face-to-face youth work, where relationships between young people and youth workers have already been formed. (Melvin, 2019:194)

Until then, they may discourage openness and warmth by blurring the identity of the youth worker and creating confusion about their positionality, boundaries, and preferences. However, in a highly digitalised world, staying connected is crucial for reasons varying from offering practical advice and brainstorming ideas out of hours to reducing risks associated with online social systems such as grooming or radicalisation. The Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN) outlines a few methods and tools to streamline hybrid work with young people (see RAN, 2022).

After a face-to-face relationship is established, it is ‘possible to make use of digital technologies to support communication, dialogue and collaboration, and to provide peer support’ (Curran & Golding, 2012) and they can be highly beneficial for young people, youth workers, and organisations. In my case, my ability to support DEIS volunteers remotely has been a significant aid to the organisation. The youth workers from Baia Mare are sometimes overwhelmed with securing funding and running major projects to sustain the organisation. Therefore, small, yet important tasks such as giving feedback on social media content, debriefing an experience, or discussing the activity plan for an event proposed by young people, might be rushed or overlooked. A message on the group chat or a quick video call can fill in the gaps in human resources and increase the quality of the experience that a young person has. However, before physically meeting most volunteers, any attempts to do this felt awkward and forced, even if they were done through video call.

While it is true that ‘many experienced professionals [...] may feel they lack the appropriate tools or insights to engage with young people in the digitalised world’ (RAN, 2022:4), it is crucial to bridge this gap in a way that allows us to use digital and social media as extensions of face-to-face youth work. Melvin suggests that ‘there is no future for online youth work: rather, the future lies in youth workers’ ability to work with young people to manage and develop their online and digital lives’ (Melvin, 2019:184). Learning how to use technology to our advantage as practitioners can help us connect to our groups and, especially in youth work, foster long-term collaborations with former members or volunteers who left organisations either due to relocation or ageing out of the participant group. Becoming more aware of how to balance online and offline interactions will most likely result in fewer experiences of feeling disconnected and adapting to a hybrid approach will enable youth workers to keep up and support young people in innovative ways.

Bibliography

Bradford, Simon (2012) Sociology, Youth and Youth Work Practice [online], Bloomsbury Publishing Available from <https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Sociology_Youth_and_Youth_Work_Practice?id=CfxGEAAAQBAJ&hl> [12 April 2023]

Coburn, Annette (2010) ‘Youth work as border pedagogy’, in J Batsleer & B Davies (eds), What is Youth Work? [online], Learning Matters, pp. 33 - 46 Available from <https://www.vlebooks.com/Product/Index/46758?page=0> [12 April 2023]

Curran, Sheila and Golding, Tyrrell (2012) ‘Moving from the periphery to the centre: promoting conversation and developing communities of practice in online environments’, in Renewing the tradition: sustaining and sustainable communities through informal education, 9-11 Jul 2012, Brathay Hall, Cumbria

Gandy-Guedes, Megan E., Michelle M. Vance, Elisabeth A. Bridgewater, Tchernavia Montgomery & Kris Taylor (2016) ‘Using Facebook as a tool for informal peer support: a case example’, Social Work Education [online], 35:3, pp. 323-332 Available from <https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cswe20> [11 April 2023]

Hine, Christine (2015) Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday, London: Bloomsbury

Melvin, Jane (2019), ‘The Future of Online Youth Work’, in Graham Bright, and Carole Pugh (eds), Youth Work: Global Futures, BRILL, pp. 184 - 203

Radicalisation Awareness Network (2022) Hybrid Youth and Social Work, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2022