What is Youth Work?

To me Youth Work is engagement, its fun, its being creative, and its learning everyday. People ask me all the time what youth development is and I give them the jargon of well its education, social work, and non profit studies. Usually their response is oh so what exactly do you want to do? I usually just tell them I want to be an athletic director and they engage into that conversation. What they don't understand from me saying that I want to be an Athletic Director is that I want to create student leaders through sports. I want to coach and help engage these students. I want to push kids so hard to the very edge of where they can go to see how far than can go and watch them realize how much they have grown and become independent people, learners, and leaders through their experiences. I want them to learn life lessons that they may not get in a classroom but through being a part of something that is bigger than you, me, and even them. I want them to go into the world knowing that they didn't just played a sport in high school but they learned how to be or be a part of something because of that sport no matter how successful or unsuccessful they were. To me, THAT is Youth Work.

PS. The article I read was This is Youth Work: Stories from Practice. I really enjoyed reading it because it gave me a sense of what real world and real life experiences are like for actual in field youth workers and what things I may encounter also and how to help be prepared for them and egage the topic.