Learn to bite your tongue. Resist a ready quip at someone else’s expense. No insults are permitted. Avoid exaggeration and boasting – arrogance isn’t a pretty sight and jars on hearing. Instead, stop and listen, you may learn something new from those you work with and for.
Sound public affairs advice is based on a clear understanding of the problem or challenge others are faced with. They are the experts in their profession or lived experience. It’s our role, in public affairs, to take political soundings and engineer a way for their concerns to be heard, and to amplify – make a noise – when public campaigns are called for.
The greatest resonance is when the arguments are evidence-based, not hollow words. Less rhetoric and more the ability to tell a compelling story that politicians will listen to.
So what happens when politicians turn a deaf ear and the arguments fall on stony ground; or your words are lost with noises off competing for airtime? Warm words but no action.
We asked Darren from the Walton Youth and Community Project for his thoughts.
“Youth work begins with trusting relationships between young people and the youth worker. It’s about creating spaces where they feel safe enough to speak, confident enough to be heard, and empowered enough to act.”
“At Walton Youth & Community Project, youth work begins with listening – truly listening – to young people. Not just to their words, but to their experiences, frustrations, hopes, and ideas.”
“We don’t speak for young people—we work alongside them, so their voices lead the conversation and shape the solutions. That’s how power shifts, and that’s how communities are changed for the better.”
That’s the lot of most youth workers and campaigns over the last 20 years. Few have the range of experience and impact on young lives that youth workers are renowned for. Their skills and training and everyday experience, in the heart of the communities they serve, provide a trustworthy adult a young person will talk to, without judgment. Connected to services for support when needed, but principally there to give space and opportunity for young people to find their own voice.
Listen to youth workers and you’ll learn how to better understand and hear what young people have to say. Listen to young people and they’ll say it’s youth work that makes a real difference to their lives. Stop, look and listen and someday soon we may be heard, helping to transform young lives and rebuild our communities – to feel safe, be heard and live life better together.
Citadel and Walton Youth & Community have teamed up for this autumn’s party conference season, with young people supported by youth workers for podcasts and interviews with politicians, reporting from Labour and Conservative conferences. We will be taking a youth bus into the conference centres in Liverpool and Manchester, kitted out as a recording studio where young people will be listened to and debate issues with Government and Opposition MPs, Mayors and councillors.
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