Ep 13 Being Creative in Youth Work

In this episode of Bellbirds Social Work Squawk, Jay and Kirsty, youth workers in Rotorua, discuss the challenges of working with young people in a rapidly changing environment. They debate whether age is a factor in relating to youth, noting that while being young can help, it's more important to be relatable and have a genuine connection with them. They also discuss the impact of social media on youth, acknowledging that they are growing up faster and facing more intense exposure to information and opinions. They express concern about the lack of objective information and the stress and anxiety that young people experience in this digital age. Kia Ora and welcome to the next episode of Bellbirds Social Work Squawk where we talk about all things social workery and it's my absolute privilege to have two guests with me today so I have Jay and Kirsty who are youth workers working in the Rotorua community and we're going to talk a little bit about working with rangatahi or taiohi in this community but also the current I guess state of what's facing people within Rotorua as a wider community and how it feels to be and trying to do good in a complex environment that we're currently facing at the moment so it's pretty exciting to have two guests on board so I really appreciate your time so thank you very much for coming. Hi Kirsty, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit? Kia Ora, my name is Kirsty. I go as far as how does the world know how old I am? I'm 31 years old. I'm born and bred in South Auckland and I've been in Rotorua for this time around the last almost four years so yeah. Shocked for having us Rach. Yeah holding on to the last crumb of youths we have left at 30. I'm 30 as well from South Auckland 267 Manurewa. You have to be specific. So you just started with a really good point there which I hadn't even thought about so you are both 30 or thereabouts and you said that you know you're hanging on to the last of the youth that you've got. Do you feel that in order to work with rangatahi to in order to be meaningful in that engagement that you yourselves need to be young because like obviously I'm way old and I'm probably less relatable certainly to my kids they think I'm kind of like well past it but do you think that age is something that's relevant in terms of work being able to work with our taiohi that come in and see you? I think it can be but I think it's also like depending on how like who you are as a person and how you were like raised to be too. I think like I don't know about you Jay but for me I started working with youth like not long after I stopped being a youth myself so I feel like I grew kind of grew up with the young people as well and I don't know I feel like that kind of helped jumping into youth work so young because you can still you're still at the age where you're like relatable with our young people with things like that. I feel like I can still be 50 and doing this but I feel like if you started randomly wanting to be a youth worker at 50 that might be a different story I don't know I don't know it could depend on the person but that's that's a little bit of my thoughts. Yeah I think it depends on the person as well I don't think you need to be young but it does help because you're kind you stay in what's relevant with the kids and the older we get the less we care about what's relevant and that's kind of what the kids care about now. We lost our youth years ago it's just a nice thing to say that we've only just recently lost it. Was it 24 was the cut off for youth? Yeah. So it's been a while but you knowing what the kids are into and knowing what they like and it lets them know that you can kind of understand where they're coming from but what I find interesting now is the youth coming up now are experiencing things that none of us went through. We were kind of on the edge of social media and things becoming a thing youth now know nothing else so that's that point of difference. That's kind of an interesting point is that even if we're young and working with youth things are changing so quickly like social media changed so quickly technology has changed so quickly I mean I remember when I was young you know like we didn't have mobile phones right I mean I remember being at school and we got our first computer it was like oh my god what is this thing you know and we were having to do c prompt like exercises of how to code and now babies are born with a mobile phone in their hand basically so we can't always keep up with them but I was also just thinking around being relatable to young people but also being in a space where we're not there to be their mates right we're there to help provide guidance provide support to give direction so finding that balance around the role that we have in youth work to guide to be able to be that sort of mentor that support person so they want to talk to you but also you've got some insight and value to offer them and that's probably quite a fine line in terms of the right age and I agree with you Kirsty like if I was to take up I've never worked with youth directly myself if I was to try and take up youth work now I think I'd be laughed out of the room I'd be trying too hard to be something that is less natural for me to be because that isn't the space that I've grown my practice in I agree with the older like you know like trying not to be friends with the young people I like to see it as like auntie status in a way because you can still have that like cool auntie relationship but you can still have the like firmer like discipline side of it too rather than trying to be these kids friends because it never goes it never works out trying to be these kids mates but I always thought of it as like the auntie status is like where I feel like I could sit at eight because you can still do all the cool fun auntie things that you'd do with your niece and or nephew but still be able to pull them aside and you know have those harder conversations that you know if you were just buddy buddies with them that's what we want to take so well so there's that definitely that line of um you know that you've got to draw between we're buddies and or having a place where you can say hey look this is something that we need to talk about you know those more serious chats but yes I agree with you on that look they're friends then but I always like to see it as yeah auntie auntie k no I'm probably on the same level well culturally most of the rangatahi we do service uh Maori and Pacific Islanders so they've kind of that would be the best outcome is if they saw us as an auntie or an uncle and um I guess trying to relay what you're going what you've seen about mobile phones and social media it's interesting because the statistics say anyway that 80 percent of people in general not just the youth people get their news from social media get their social connection from social media and that's a space that I came up after you reached but I never really connected with social media so that's always been an obstacle for me in connecting with the youth so having to find things around find ways around that as well is important no matter what age you're at because I think like we were the last generation that experienced like the before technology and then like growing up with it as well because anyone before us would have been brought up without the technology before social media yeah social media like because of that would have come out while we had Bebo back then MSN messenger yeah like when we were like you know young like you know 12 13 14 probably age that's when that kind of all started off so we kind of like grew up with it just but anyone before us they would have missed that or like not grown up with technology but it is it's real like it's very common now for our young ones but I feel like our youth are growing up so much quicker like in age these days as well like I don't know when it comes to a whole bunch of social media included other topics included like we're just they're maturing so much quicker than you would I think it's just a sign of us growing quicker you know you know you're old when you're saying the kids are growing up so much faster these days they would have grown up the same way but no I agree um name one rangatahi that doesn't have social media yeah it's almost all of them almost all of them I think it's it's weird and even strange for a rangatahi not to have one these days yeah yeah which is a bit of a shame I think Jay you've got a point in terms of you know I look at people driving and I think how's that 12 year old driving like um your perspective gets warped the older you get but I also think that rangatahi are exposed to a lot more than when I think about my childhood I left school I went home unless someone wanted to come around my house you know I basically didn't hear from them again until I went back to school the next day whereas now the news is on my phone information's on my phone like information spreads rapidly people can contact you like the exposure is just so much more intense that people have to kind of get a little bit more streetwise with it so much quicker than I was had my little bubble really and I worry as well that when we think about the news being on social media and the accessibility of things you know people talk about the news used to be they used to provide information and we would be able to make an opinion about it now the news is people's opinions and we've got to work out where's the information you know everything's so rapid you get instead of like the newspaper used to come out once a day and that was that now you're getting news feeds updated every 30 seconds so they've got all this fill right all this kind of like opinion pieces and observation pieces and kind of junk really how is any young person supposed to make sense of the world when it's seen through other people's perspectives there's no kind of objective information out there everything is subjective you know I think about you know my children are 21 and 22 and I think about the what they've had to live through in terms of the level of stress the level of anxiety all the experiences they've had with you know they can't escape their phones they can't escape people if they want to harass them or send them messages or whatever that's highly stressful compared to I mean when I was a kid we used to run around people's houses and put a shitty note through your door I mean it took it took effort right like you know and it was relatively harmless comparative to this kind of like feeds of people who are saying you know you should die you should kill yourself or whatever like horrific stuff that gets posted on people's feeds and I wonder how resilient young people are to cope with that when they themselves have few tools to be able to draw on to be that and to have the ability to understand kind of I guess how to manage that kind of stress or pressure or anxiety you know what do you think are the main sort of issues that are facing the young people that you work with for example if we're rolling off social media a big one is body image positivity or negativity that's a big thing on social media that we get from majority of our wahine but some of our tama another big one in the social media is flexing so ripping off things for clout I think clout's a big thing since social media has come through doing things for the attention doing things to get noticed that they probably normally wouldn't do yeah bullying there's a lot of bullying what would you say bro you're you're actually on social media yeah um I agree that social media plays a huge part of it because I think we spend well a lot of us especially our young people spend majority of their time on it and there is like the big I guess like a lot of influences and it plays a lot like you said on um body image especially for our females but even for our males you know like seeing celebrities like you don't know you're gonna look at the rocky or look at all these muscly guys as well it's a body image for males too that they want to kind of have their image too for our females um especially all the influence and stuff that you have on instagram and all that too there's a lot of pressure or expectation and I think like social media because I feel like a lot a lot of young people will spend time at home and be on social media and that's kind of their way of exploring the world rather than you know going outside and exploring it yourself so that's kind of the only platform you have to show the world who you are so you want to put up things that are like this is what I have and this is like you know like to kind of make yourself almost like fit in I think that's like a big thing as well for our young people is trying to feel like they fit in somewhere um and then what they're willing to do you know to be able to fit in whether it's um you know having a partner got a lot of young people that you know their friends might have partners so they feel like oh I've got to have someone and then you know that that's a whole nother conversation of going for something that might not be healthy or you know someone that you might not even be um too keen on but you want to have that you know this is what I have to do to fit in kind of thing all these different things that our young people do to try and fit in um even like the gangs around here in Rotorua you know being a part of that or being a part of that family too you know so I think there's a whole bunch of stuff eh but social media is a huge one and I think just the expectation of being cool of fitting in otherwise the bullying and all of that comes in when you don't and I think that's like a fear of you don't want to be that person kind of thing so what can I do to get out of that or you know what can I do to fit in kind of thing so I worry if it's the false narrative so right like it's almost like we live this world outside sort of narrative this is what the public perception of me is and then there's the internal like real me and that that creates quite a divide you know this is the persona that I put out that I'm got like this I've got it all together you know and we live this kind of perception and I think when Instagram influencers became a thing I was just like this is this bonkers kind of industry now where we've got people on Instagram who are influencing people by posting photoshopped pictures of themselves on holiday it's like how is this a industry but I think that one of the things in terms of our I guess emotional well-being our mental health is that disconnect from reality or that disconnect from that sense of self and I think social media and those kind of tools perpetuate that divide that actually I can't acknowledge who I am because I have to be this thing that people see but actually 95 percent of stuff that we see on social media is but one aspect of someone's whole life right like I only post the photos of me smiling I don't post the photos of the rest of my day yeah like just like you know it's so it's it's just this kind of we're creating these false realities that then create this kind of I think emotional disconnect and and then I worry what that does for our sense of identity in a deep-rooted way yeah I mean just my experience of seeing people's social medias a majority of the time with like highlight reels and not really that person's life so I can understand why people would just want to live in that highlight reel rather than face to face what's actually going on in their lives but it's kind of it's what inspires my usual response when people go why aren't you on social media why aren't you got this once you got that and my response is always I don't have social media because I have a social life but it's not like a dig at people with social medias because I actually value going out and seeing people I value doing things and not taking a photo of it because that's the moment capture that seems to be more important to people in the moment itself and I feel like if people took time just to do the moments then they wouldn't really care as much but it is a balancing act right they're not going to get all the likes and stuff does it does it seem like that's what people go for yeah I'm seeing views likes comments you'll see like anyone who does like streaming or influencers they're always saying you know don't forget to follow them exactly how many followers I've got but I think like a big part of that too is that nowadays people are making income off like off their views and off their followers and off people subscribing to them so it's actually like an income so they're encouraging you know young people especially on tiktok I think that's like probably the biggest platform for young people watching videos and things like that they've got you know influencers encouraging them you know follow me come see me I'm on here every day at this time you know like come and be a part of this so there's a lot of like encouragement from the ones who are you know like influencing stuff to to be a part of that like social media and some of that self-efficacy I think is inspiring kind of just taking themselves and making a product out of it I would just say that the negative side of that coin is that everyone kind of becomes a commodity and not necessarily realizing what they're spending all that time they're spending and all that personal data that they're kind of giving away to influence consumerism and getting targeted specifically and it's almost at the point where it's like we know our friends are listening to us we know that ad is for that who cares so it's kind of like we're blown over and it's not really a thing anymore it's just normal so I'm pretty sure after this we're going to get ads for podcasting equipment stuff like that and I guess the cost with that is that we're training people to have a sense of validation from external factors right that I am only valid if I've got this many likes I'm only worthy or I only have value if people you know like me follow me and therefore if I don't have followers if I don't get the likes then somehow I'm less than and I worry that we're moving into this sense or the space of of how we value ourselves that we don't actually we can't intrinsically support ourselves and value ourselves for being just the people that we are that somehow we've got to constantly get this external validation that is fake like it's not real they're not like these followers don't like you they're not your friends they don't know you that you know like it's all like you say it's a commercialization of popularity it's just this massive capitalist wheel that's moving around and the commodity is humanity essentially and we're losing sort of our humanity because we're not actually having real relationships and real conversations I mean I talk to some people and they're like oh I've got like this 300 friends on Facebook and I've got whatever a thousand followers on this and I'm like do you actually even know these people like no you don't like would you have any of them around your house like you know I kind of hope not because they're people you don't even know like but somehow that's got a value and therefore that value means I'm somebody and I think that's a real worry for the future of our sense of humanity connection humanness and that whole thing that you know babies are failing to understand or read people's emotions because their parents continually look at their phones the whole time they're not even making eye contact anymore and so we're we're really losing I guess that and what that means for the those future generations but we could go down a social media rabbit hole and be here all day so talk to me about a different kind of aspect about youth work what made me talk about kind of what really drew you to wanting to be youth work is you know Dashie said you got into it kind of just as you were coming out of being a young person yourself what was it that really kind of drove that desire to get involved and work with young people I used to go to like a youth group when I was I think I started a youth group when I was like 13 and then I joined another youth group at the age of 15 and I stuck with that youth group probably till I was maybe early 20s so I went from you know one of the young people myself into being someone who helped you know had more of a leadership role within that and I like at the time was working in retail so I think I got my first job when I just turned 15 which is a rebel sport and I stayed in retail for I think it was like seven or eight years and I kind of got to a point where I was like I don't want to do this all my life I didn't finish school I think I got NCEA level one even though I was there till year 13 like halfway through year 13 but I only got level one I wasn't the best student that's another story for another time and um yeah I got to a point where I was like I don't want to do retail for the rest of my life but like what else can I do you know what else do I enjoy and I was like well the youth thing was like like being part of the youth group was a big part of my life you know I was like really close with the people within that environment and it was the one thing that I enjoyed doing and so I thought like I love working and being like a leader in this space so that's something I potentially could look into so I ended up going and just studying the getting the certificate for applied social services or applied social work and um that was the first time I moved to Rotorua I think I was like 23 and I um got a job at the YJ which like to me I was like oh man this is my first like youth work job and I just jumped in at the you know at the YJ so it was a pretty big step for like a first role but I was like I was keen and I really enjoyed that space and I really enjoyed those young people in there and just like being able to not just be a person of like I never wanted to just be a person of authority you know like I wanted to be the one that um grabs a rugby ball and goes out and you know like or shoot hoops with the boys and you know have conversations those ways rather than you know having to you know I kind of see at one o'clock we'll sit in the room and we'll have a you know like so like I don't know just more chilled and I kind of I feel like that's what I was good at bringing was that I don't know a relaxing space or a relaxing person where you feel comfortable to be able to talk about things while doing things like shooting hoops or things squash against the wall or like you know like little things like that so the passion grew from there like yeah from just I think I like doing this this is the one thing in my life that I think I really enjoy doing so I'm gonna try and pursue that and then from then I just the passion I guess grew as the years went by and so here we are I think I've been doing it for eight years now yeah so so far so good still love it yeah what about you Jay? We grew up quite pagan on our birthdays we'd usually volunteer at night shelters or stuff like that so social work was kind of ingrained in our lives not necessarily youth work but maybe indirectly through whanau there was always a thing growing up is that you would whanau at least one person a year so there was always a sense of we don't have much but others have less and graduated high school in Oz and my first kind of work placement was being a I was doing my social work paper over in Oz and my first placement was in was with the Wajahati people in Western Australia and that was my first experience with delivering social work and it was kind of a deep end as well but like YJ I was was there employed to look after I think was 20 or 30 young people over a six-month period it ended up being more like delivering social work to everyone that needed it there for that time so kind of gave me insight into what I really wanted to do in the areas that's what I lacked in and I thought I lacked in the adults being able to support adults because I was so young 17 18 and I did that for about a year or two and then got into other passions and about eight nine years later I got back into social work through the needs through starting a whanau and kind of needing to be in a more structured time set and got involved in housing first contracts and I was supporting homeless people in Wellington and I knew something was missing and the mahi I did I loved it but something was missing and then I kind of clicked and I needed to go back to the youth and to where it all started so it's kind of like a 10-year loop back to where I was and if I was to count all the years together I've probably been doing this for maybe four or five now and still love it yes that's truthful yes I still love it I still love the mahi and I believe it's my purpose so far how about you yeah I agree I always said if I lost youth work I didn't I don't know what I don't know what I'd do where I'd go like I would feel lost without that element in my life kind of thing yeah so I agree I feel like yeah this is what we need to do especially like within our mahi now and the fact that we can use music and stuff which is something that well for me I'm like real passionate about too so right now is even it's perfect you know I get to the two things I love doing I combine them together and you know do it yeah I agree with that as well because coming from a career in film and the art the social work part was missing from that yeah so if you go from one passion and it not being enough to another and it being enough and finding that balance was probably the best thing so maybe can you talk a little bit more about how you use those creative elements in youth work like music or film and art what how do you how do they align and how do you use them to support your work so with like the music workshops we do we it's about music and it's about learning the skills that come you know with music and how to make music and all of that it's also like a cool tool because it allows you to have conversations with you know whether it's a simple how was your day with what we do with our music like workshops as we try to implement different like skills to develop so things like you know in the space they can gain confidence they can gain leadership skills you know there's all these things that you can work on with this self-expression and music like you know you can talk about your emotions we use the Te Whare Taparima model in there so there's like there's a whole bunch of things that you can relate and how does Te Whare Taparima relate to music you know and teaching them that stuff too so there's just a whole lot of um you know skills that you can put in there that on top of the music skills that they're learning that they might not even realize that they're getting out of it you know and it could be as simple as you know a young person coming in extremely shy and then by the end of it being able to like perform a song in front of their friends they've grown in confidence with that or you know there's some kind of like self-growth within the workshop the workshops are like 10 weeks you know but then outside of that if you have a conversation and you notice you know your in-person come in you know a little bit quieter one day than they were the last couple weeks then it's an opportunity to say hey let's catch up you know at another time and let's dive into it a bit deeper so then you do have that space to just sit and say you know what's going on kind of thing and let's just talk about it you know so it's a cool tool um to use as well as then getting some cool cool music skills and stuff like that no why to talk all that whole thing um it's funny right because the workshops are almost irrelevant compared to what we're actually there for but it's good it's a good cover because young people show up for things that they want to do and we're lucky enough to have people who are skillful in in these industries and able to show them like the basics and foundations of the techniques and in the gear and the software to run off and do what they want to do with it and we're getting some really cool stuff coming out of it i love it because it is something to do alongside a young person while you're doing their youth work while you're asking those conversations which they wouldn't normally answer under normal situations but because you're there creating with them helping them figure out these things and you're right people who are sure they would never do anything walk away with their own art their own products they can see their own development through that the benefit of having these workshops is something different than just hey we need to talk about this come through yeah yeah creates like a safer environment hey or like the environment's completely different than you know like i've noticed that even when i was down there as soon as someone said the word counseling to me i was like oh no i'm not doing counseling that's that's not cool like you know that's we don't do that if you're not cool if you do counseling you know so there's a whole different element to going on just come and do some counseling or let's come in and make some music or record a film and we'll just chat along the way you know like it's it's so much more approachable you know if you want to like yeah that sounds good i'll do that yeah and nine times out of ten what they're making is bang on to what they're going through yeah it's hidden in in the art itself so it might be like a love song and they've gone through a breakup or it might be like a gang related film and they're struggling with that duality of gang life at home and their own path and what they want to take so the kids almost tell us straight off the bat what's happening they just don't they just kind of i guess it's it's in a setting where it's safe like you said and that collaborative aspect of it makes them more free and open to discuss that even more and work on that and unpack that so they get to say what's on their mind but on their terms and how they want to say it you know rather than sitting and just having to say it you know it's more comfortable being able to do it their way kind of thing and express that way it's cool yeah and they they do get something out of it because i think that's something we've noticed on most youths that we work with especially in the counseling space you know because we know how european counseling works it's the you you get out what you put in but young people have this expectation that they that these are adults that we're going through so of course they're going to fix us and when we inevitably don't fix you in these small therapy counseling sessions it's like well that didn't work so these workshops are alternative avenues towards that from what i've experienced there's a whole lot more freedom because you're not necessarily as time constrained you know sometimes in kind of more structured therapeutic interventions it's like you turn up for an hour it's kind of yeah let's sit opposite each other and i'm gonna you know i mean obviously people work hard to make them comfortable but they're in a more therapeutic setting you're in a youth development space where you can have that foundational stuff you talked about and being able to utilize that and you have other assessment tools or ability to be able to kind of understand people in the holistic sense of who they are but it's in a youth development approach in terms of building their confidence they're building their sense of self building their identity understanding negative behavior patterns and being able to reframe them or being able to give them a sense of purpose and then all under the kind of outlook of actually creating something communicating in a way in which perhaps they can't verbalize what's going on for them or they don't want to articulate how they're feeling or don't have the words for it but can write some lyrics or can show it in a film or can express it in a way that actually feels much safer and less kind of exposing than sitting opposite somebody and saying oh actually i this is how i feel because it's hard work to express how you feel you know i think adults struggle with finding language to talk about that let alone put it having an expectation on young people to be able to know what those feelings are or what's going on and it is very complex because a lot of the stuff they're facing picking up on what you were saying jay in terms of their it's environmental right so there's some duality perhaps going on in terms of what's happening at home parental behavior what it's like but they are young people who are heading into adulthood who are making their own choices and going on their own life trajectory and what does that mean for them in terms of sometimes the tension between what people want for them and what they want for themselves you know that's complicated so that can be hard to find your way through that with words and actually self-expression you know is a tool to use so that's pretty cool yeah i think like the group dynamic can help to like walk it in and go off you know there's a lot of young people that are here for the exact same reason i am so that's kind of cool you know i'm not doing this alone or it's not awkward that i'm doing it by myself yeah we benefit from those group sessions and facilitating to a kind of tamer relationship in those settings as well so we're always reinforcing hey this is a place that you can be and want to be and and yeah it does make it a lot more easier than a clinical approach thank you for taking us on a little bit of a journey around youth work and what it means for you and what you enjoy from it and here's hoping that yeah you spend the next 20 years 30 years still loving it and i guess you know who knows where our journeys through our careers take us i mean i think kirsty you said something around kind of you just don't know what you would do if you weren't doing this work that sense of real purpose being on purpose and aligned with your vocation is really powerful and that comes through in the heart that you give the people you work with that it's not just a job it's something that is genuinely something you really care about and i know that goes for you too jay so thank you so much for sharing your time with me today um any last words any bits of wisdom you'd like to leave us with i heard a good quote the other day spend so much time on self-improvement that you don't have time to criticize others i love your quote too around only ever look at over the fence at other people to make sure they have enough yeah you know quite often we're looking over the fence to to suss out what we don't have yeah and also to maybe be critical about what's going on with them yeah and actually we forget that we're part of a community that actually needs our support and compassion not our criticism or our judgment or our comparison who's got more and is it fair but actually as a whole we have enough so it was a quote of yours that really resonated to me well i guess that's a reflection of you know which you probably notice more than anyone how underfunded the social sector can be so yeah only look in your neighbor's bowl to make sure that they have enough and i guess to elaborate on that there's there might be times i've seen it before there might be times where social workers feel like they're not getting paid what they're worth or paid what the job asks for but i think that a lot of things that we miss in the social sector is the privileges that come with it that ain't necessarily monetary i'm talking social i'm talking the connection and the privilege of getting this these type of insights into people's lives that would make any normal person uncomfortable the type of things that you know we have to dive into so yeah there's privileges in in other places in the job if you're suffering burnout there's something to keep into account for me ultimately we're here to be of service special shout out to balbird on 1218 hopper street come on down thank you both really appreciate your time and for everybody listening to the podcast would love to hear your comments your thoughts your feedback yeah so please do leave a comment and feel free to come join us on a podcast yourself maybe one day