Job Title: Sessional Youth Worker
Accountable to: Operations Manager
Date of post: April 2022- March 2021
Rate of pay: £12 per hr
Hours per week: 10 hrs per week on flexible rota
Evening and weekend work may be required.
Based in: Liverpool
Sports Alive are a centre based and outreach organisation that works with under privileged and hard to reach young people within our local communities. We use the delivery of free sport sessions and arts and craft to engage our young people. These activities are used as a vehicle to build strong relationships, which then leads to conversations around the impact of social and current issues that a young person may be experiencing, either at home or in general. Our sessions are aimed at getting young people actively engaged with our experienced youth workers to support them in building their confidence and educating them to make healthy choices.
Sports Alive aims to create “Stronger, Safer, and Healthier communities,” we believe the best way to do this is:
Stronger: Encouragement is used to engage underrepresented groups or hard to reach young people on the streets in parks or troubled areas. Encouragement, to participate in sporting and recreational activities and encouragement to move away from areas in which anti-social behaviour (ASB) is happening. Sports Alive believe that this type of approach can help with a reduction in (ASB) and helps to build a stronger relationship with young people.
Safer: To strive to build positive relationships between young people and the communities where they live. This allows young people to feel safe and have a positive influence and voice for all to feel safe, stable, and accepted. We believe by creating these relationships, helps reduce risk, ASB and allows everyone to live positively side by side.
Healthier: Our engagement through activities, allows us to have the conversations around healthier lifestyles. Conversation around being healthier, through sporting activities, exercise and movement, changing our eating habits, and conversations around self-care, healthy relationships and personal development, this can be achieved through our group work, targeted projects and 1-1 sessions.
Youth Workers role
The role of youth worker is to help facilitate personal, social and educational growth in the young people we work with and supporting them to reach their full potential within society. Youth work’s core values are about building relationships and having positive conversations between both parties.
Our Youth workers support young people between the ages of 5-25, by working in a variety of settings.
- Youth centres
- Schools
- Street Based
- Colleges
Youth Workers focus should always remain around the cornerstones:
Sports Alive contention is to reaffirm our belief in an emancipatory and democratic youth work, whose cornerstones are:
- The sanctity of the voluntary principle: freedom for young people to enter in to and withdraw from youth work if they wish.
- A commitment to conversation with young people which start from their concerns and within which both youth worker and young person are educated and out of which opportunities for new learning and experience can be created.
- The importance of association, of fostering supportive relationships, of encouraging the development of autonomous groups and ‘the sharing of common life.’
- A commitment of valuing and attending to the here and now of young people’s experience rather than focusing on ‘transitions.
- An insistence upon a democratic practise, within which every effort is made to ensure that young people play the fullest part in making decisions about anything affecting them.
- The continuing necessity of recognising that young people are not a homogenous group and that issues of class, gender, race, sexuality, and disability remain central.
- The essential significance of the youth worker themselves, whose outlook, integrity and autonomy are at the heart of fashioning a serious yet humorous, improvisatory, yet rehearsed educational practise with young people.
Essential Key Skills
- Experience in Youth worker role
- Basic relevant qualifications
- Person centred approach
- Work effectively as part of a team
- Organisational Skills, Planning sessions in advance.
- Effective Verbal and written communication key to everyday work
- Maturity within your job role
- Reliability and honesty to sessional work
- Responsibility to yourself, young people, and work colleagues
- Resilience
- Being able to use initiative
- Flexible working
- Be able to pass an enhanced Disclosure barring service.
- Report writing and data collection
- Ability to travel to and from sessions
Desirable Skills
- Level 3 Youth work qualification or equivalent
- Full clean driving licence
- Have proven leadership skills and or experience
- Produce two work related references on request
Role of Youth Worker can vary day to day but in addition to working with young people our face-to-face activities involve:
Youth Worker main responsibilities will include:
- To work as part of the youth team to deliver a high-quality youth work programme. Creating exciting and innovative opportunities with the aim to improving lives of young people and the wider communities they live in.
- To deliver a varied sports programmes for young people, ensuring young people can engage regardless of creativity, ability, or experience.
- To develop, deliver creative session plans, in both sports, physical health and develop experiences within arts and culture.
- Deliver, monitor, and review activities in line with programmes planned to meet the needs of the young people.
- Assess and adapt to the need of young people, plan out and deliver programmes related to areas such as physical and mental needs, positive active lifestyles, anti-social behaviour, youth crime, personal development, and self-care.
- Commitment to engage in conversations with young people, starting from their concerns
- Mentoring, coaching, and supporting young person to facilitate personal, social, and educational growth and encouragement for greater social inclusion.
- To be alert to issues of safeguarding, behaviour management and incident reporting processes, always ensuring the welfare and safety of all our young people.
- Undertaking daily administrative task, risk assessments and maintaining effective reporting on daily basis to support monthly and annual reports.
- Working in partnership with safety agencies (Police, youth offending teams, local authorities, social services
- Be able to dynamic, and assess risk in all areas of our work, including situations, workspaces and environments and be able to adapt and deliver changes when and where needed.
To apply for this position, if you would like any more information regarding this post, please email your CV along with covering letter to The Operations Manager: Lianne McGinnes by 12pm on closing date of Friday 1st April 2022.
liannemcginnes@sports-alive.org.
Alternatively, you can send them to Adlam activity park, Adlam park, Adlam road, Fazakerley, Liverpool L10 1LG