Tragedy, Beauty, Growth

Maturing as a youth worker means finding a steady path

Illustration by Raj Dhunna

Not so long ago, and not for the first time, I wrote a letter to a young man in prison. I’ll call him Devon. Wary of getting the tone wrong, failing to keep my perfectionism at bay, it took a few scrunched-and-binned attempts to scribe the right message before I settled on the final version.

My intention was not to generate a response. In my own way, it was to communicate to Devon that I am — despite our estrangement, despite having not shaken his hand for five flown-by years — still invested in his journey. So I kept it simple. I asked how he was doing, offered words of encouragement, reflected positively on memories of working with him and his friends. I made it clear that he was welcome to write back, if he felt to. The act of folding the paper, slipping it into an envelope, thumbing down a stamp and walking to post it in the letterbox felt more purposeful than a thousand emails ever could.

Devon was a leading voice in one of the first youth groups with whom I facilitated sessions as a wide-eyed youth worker. He was the smartest in the room, the most committed to speaking his truth, the first to challenge his peers on their dishonesty or disrespect. Despite excelling in our sessions at the youth club, he was excluded from several schools, not for harming anyone, but for his stubborn refusal to follow the rules. He seemed to fairly feel they were an irrelevance to his lived, concrete reality: chaotic single parenthood inside the home; attacks by rival boys and stop-and-searches by police outside of it; rational temptations to make cash-in-hand under the wing of corrupted, red-eyed elders on his estate via illicit means.

But Devon was impressively resolute to move individually, untouched by groupthink or social media hype. He rejected the common and easily-bought notion among adolescents navigating inner-city complexity that joining a gang would make him safer. When he stepped in the booth to record raps, he did so alone. He was no angel, but his approach of conviction shattered my expectations in an empowering direction. Given the circumstances, like so many boys trapped between a rock and a hard place, he faced few genuine choices to be free. I empathised with his frustrations. Now, I often think about him, and others who made those early years what they were, as having taught me vital lessons.

As I progress further into my thirties and sustain my practice as a youth worker alongside a writing career, I learn to balance as I juggle. And as time works its subtle magic, I am increasingly aware that the pool of young people who I’ve come into contact with — at the youth club or music studio, in the school classroom or over Zoom workshops — gets bigger and bigger. Due to inevitable changes in jobs, unpredictable evolutions in all our lives, and the cyclical nature of funding opportunities, only a portion of them have remained on my radar. Many of those who I connected with at the very start are themselves nearing the age that I was when we first met. It’s disorientating when I hear news about old faces and voices, in good ways and bad.

Devon is not the only young person in this cohort whose life has brushed with tragedy. Far from it. The number of young men who once sat in my workshops as boys who have since lost their lives prematurely — in the words of rapper Jesse James Solomon, “lost souls who got froze in time” — or who have been sent to prison — “boys who never got no food for thought and got fed time” — now number well into double figures. It’s hard not to think about how things might have gone differently.

I hear stories and gossip from those who I have managed to stay in contact with, or others I bump into. I receive a local news item forwarded to me by a former colleague on WhatsApp. I catch the odd lyric of a drill song: RIP or free so-and-so. The deeper I dive into the justice system’s murky waters as an expert witness in criminal trials, the more I keep recognising a victim or codefendant’s name tag or residential address, or a street corner, or a territorial rivalry, or an underground musical reference to the chaos of my south-of-the-Thames locality, all buried in the numbered PDF pages of a dense evidence document. And then it all starts to feel so inevitable, so overwhelming.

But the tragedy can be offset by beauty. Seeking this remedy is the only way to carry on. The stems that grow from some seeds are cut or stamped upon. The stems that grow from others towards the light, making use of the space they’re afforded, bloom, blossom and add colour to the rainy grey sky and wet pavement. We endure winter’s cold in preparation for spring’s yellow.

One of the greatest privileges of my life is that I get to hear about the ongoing journeys of Jhemar, Carl and Demetri — the three main characters in my book, Cut Short. I started mentoring them when they were 12, 13 and 14, respectively, and the book’s story finishes five years after that. They are now well into their early twenties. Their involvement in co-writing the book has brought them closer together. All three are now youth workers-in-training.

Jhemar is a rapper called Rippa. Carl is a competitive athlete with dreams of making it to the Olympics. Demetri helps me to deliver writing workshops with groups of young people. Nothing in their or anyone’s trajectories is completely smooth. They all have friends in prison or who have been lost to the roads. The fickle dangers that accompany their attempts at maintaining diplomacy are never too faraway. When I field their calls, I am reminded not to take our wins for granted. But as a collective of heroes, they are living, breathing evidence that, as a youth worker — or anyone who works directly on the frontline of social change — managing to invest consistently in people will pay the world back tenfold.

In 2015 I met a 16-year-old called Edwina Omokaro when I was working as an academic mentor at her sixth-form college. Years later, long after I’d moved jobs, during the deepest months of the pandemic in early-2021, Edwina happened to apply for a three-month writing mentorship programme I was delivering online, supporting young creatives to enter the music industry. By the end of the programme, she’d achieved her first commission writing about Alté music for gal-dem.

Last month Edwina called me and expressed that she would soon be travelling to Nigeria to visit family. She wanted to talk through a plan-of-action for writing about it. I never could have predicted that we’d be speaking in 2023, let alone about her travel writing. These moments of reconnection speak for themselves. I can’t predict or force them. But they are what makes me believe.

It is easy to go and go and go without taking time to stop and reflect. A third way between the tragedy and beauty is inner-growth. Every day, in my diary pages, I write three words that feel relevant to repeat here: humility, gratitude, patience.

I know now that I can’t control everything, and that’s okay. In fact, I think we end up gaining more control when we let go of expectations. Devon never wrote back, but I reckon our paths will cross again some day.

By Ciaran Thapar