Caring. Youth Social Work
Since its foundation, the IB and many of its services have focused on youth. The IB’s youth work and youth welfare services, its professional rehabilitation assistance, social work and its own schools and educational centres offer educational and development opportunities to young people. In its mission statement and vision of mankind, the IB tries to eliminate any barrier in the life of both the individual and society and to grant everyone the right to develop freely, to take responsibility and to participate actively in the development of society. These services are based on the principles of inclusion and empowerment. All young people should receive the same opportunities and learn to respect diversity. Empowerment is taken to mean motivating young people to activate their own opportunities and strengths, in order to solve problems, to overcome crises and stressful situations self-reliantly. The IB has created its own guidelines to assure the utmost protection of children and young people.
In the scope of international youth social work projects, the IB promotes young people’s key competences improving their professional and social skills. The IB is a member of various European networks, including among others the Youth and European Social Work (YES) Forum, which is active in international youth social work.
The IB’s youth social work can basically be separated into three core areas with increasing relevance: school related, vocation and work related and social environment related youth social work.
Services:
Youth Social Work at Schools
The IB runs school related youth social work projects in more than 200 municipalities and at more than 650 schools. The goal is to support school children in their development, enabling them to fully use their potentials and eventually finish school successfully. The IB offers a broad variety of youth social work projects at schools that can take place inside or outside schools depending on the orientation of the project. The IB has been working successfully with persistent truants, offers specific programmes for career guidance and has put its focus on prevention and intervention services for a long time. Our wide range of activities comprises crèches, cafes for students, workshops at schools and pilot projects in the fields of professional orientation, career planning and skill checks, innovative ways to reintegrate persistent truants as well as services offered in the framework of the German national program to increase the number of all-day schools. In the opinion of the IB, all day schools have the potential to become places of learning and living by connecting pedagogical school measures with social pedagogical and leisure time pedagogical offers in a systematic conceptual way. Following this conviction, the IB has, for many years, participated actively and successfully in the development and design of day schools in all school types in Germany and abroad; we have done so by offering individual coaching, leisure time projects, support and lunch offers.
Youth Social Work in Specific Social Envorinments
Nowadays, successful social work with children and adolescents has to take place within their respective social environments. Linking and harmonizing offers within an urban district or neighbourhood makes these measures successful, as they are able to meet the specific social environmental needs of children and adolescents. Therefore almost all IB services are integrated into local networks. The most complex work in this regard is conducted in projects of neighbourhood and social environment management. The aim of these projects is to improve housing and living conditions in a specific neighbourhood by always involving the neighbours and all important partners within the neighbourhood. All stakeholders in the project area are mobilised and activated in order to implement positive developments in their respective social environments. Additionally, the IB runs many different social environment projects that are designed with a specific content or a specific target group in mind. These include neighbourhood meeting places for people with different cultural and/or national backgrounds, youth social work projects that directly approach their clients using methods of streetwork, multi-generational houses, and parent-child-centres or projects to convey intercultural competence or to prevent violence within the neighbourhood.
The project is a component of the programme aimed at improving the quality of basic education in Kosovo. It is directed at children and youths who absent themselves from school or drop out before the end of compulsory schooling, and to school leavers who do not succeed in continuing to further education or apprenticeship.
The objective of the project is to implement tested prevention instruments and certified non-formal education programmes nationwide within the framework of a MEST national strategy.
This will be achieved through the implementation of appropriate measures in the following two intervention areas:
- to develop and implement a national strategy and accompanying measures for the prevention of early school leaving and for the re-integration of school drop-outs into the formal education system; and
- to establish demand-oriented education and training measures allowing early school leavers to obtain a formal degree.
Services Provided
Services include
- consulting services and advice for the client in close consultation and cooperation with the responsible public authorities, and
- quality management according EFQM standards.
Intervention area 1: Prevention of school drop-out
- Development of a national strategy for the prevention of school drop-outs
- Elaboration of an action plan including pilot programmes
- Integration of preventive measures in formal basic education
- Identification and development of appropriate prevention measures
- Development of curricula for catch-up courses
- Development and implementation of student-centred teaching methods.
Intervention area 2: Qualification of school drop-outs
- Establishment of educational offers for school drop-outs at local level
- Training of multipliers
- Capacity building for implementing agencies
- Support to organisational development and managing change
Advise to the accreditation of trainers and training providers
Vocation and Work Related Youth Social Work
The IB offers young people better opportunities for their entry into the world of work. Measures within the framework of youth social work help to foster and motivate adolescents and young adults in their vocational training and social integration. In addition to personal support, IB services comprise counselling and leisure time activities as well as cafes and workshops for apprentices. The IB imparts competences, offers opportunities to take a democratic stance and to lobby for individual interests. With our Foundation and campaign Schwarz, Rot, Bunt für Demokratie und Akzeptanz (Black, Red and Colourful pro-Democracy and Acceptance) the IB has created the necessary conditions to encourage this work. It offers seminars on civic education, projects and events on topics such as violence and right-wing extremism. Adolescents cover the basics of democracy and its challenges in their classes at the vocational training centres. The IB understands the prevention of violence as a task that cuts across and touches upon all its projects.