The Internal Organizational Problems - Personal Statement Example

Change, Partnership and Evaluation I worked in a youth centre which managed a variety of youth work, including detached work in the remote areas surrounding the centre. After being appointed, having met with all the youth groups assigned to me and acquainting myself with the young people, I discovered that there were a few organizational problems faced by the youth centre at that time. As a result, it underwent some organizational changes. These changes partly occurred in response to a demographic change as well and they enabled the youth centre to cater to the masses of young people entering the area due to elevated immigration rates. The change I am describing is partly developmental, partly transitional and partly transformational. Eradicating the internal organizational problems lead to a developmental change. Reconfiguring the existing youth volunteer program and expanding youth work to cater to the influx of young immigrants lead to a transitional change. Linking the youth centre’s programme to the Every Child Matters Green Paper lead to a transformational change. The developmental change included building disabled access, and conforming to health and safety requirements. For the transitional change, many strategies were considered, including rotation, job sharing, segmentation, team volunteering and substitution. By conforming to health and safety standards, the centre took its first step in linking itself with Every Child Matters Green Paper. All these changes have different sources introduced in the framework developed by Johnson and Scholes (2002). The influx of young immigrants has roots in political and legal, economic and socio-cultural changes. Some revision to the immigration laws made immigration easier (political and legal) while economic attractiveness caused young people to immigrate to the area of the youth centre. Due to this influx of immigrants, cultural diversity will prevail in the area. But these young immigrants face a social dilemma of being in a new land, they do not know many people and that is where the youth centre comes into play. The implications of these changes on the youth centre were drastic. Adhering to the Every Child Matters programme by conforming to the health and safety requirements made the youth centre more credible. By reconfiguring the volunteer programme, more young people were given the opportunity to come and work for the youth centre. By implementing the job sharing strategy, volunteers were appointed tasks which made effective use of their individual skills. The advantage of the rotation strategy was that seasonal workers and students could make their contributions for a given period of time (three or five months). Segmentation broke down labour-intensive jobs into short-term, manageable tasks which made effective use of volunteers’ skills. Team volunteering lightened the load on everyone and made the volunteers specialize according to their skills. In all of the strategies above, the basic principle is to effectively make use of the volunteers’ skills and talents without burdening them too much. When so many young volunteers work together, they will learn more as well. Also, the young immigrants will get a chance to work as volunteers and it will help them make new friends and settle in the community. The youth centre also paid closer attention to volunteer training in addition to strategies to engage more young people in volunteer work. Volunteer training enhances young people’s knowledge of social issues and remedies because they interact with a large number of people. The intention of these changes was to make the youth centre more effective and credible, and overcome the organizational problems that would hinder the basic goals to be achieved by the youth centre. As a practitioner working with young people, I strongly believe in the outcomes of Every Child Matters Green Paper; children and young people should be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being. Any positive change that enhances the youth centre’s chances of achieving the five outcomes mentioned above is most welcome. The youth centre will have to consider changes in provision as a result of the changes stated above. We know that a lot of young people have migrated to this area but we have to take into consideration their ethnicity and ensure that they are given equal opportunities. The youth centre should also consider collaborating with educational institutions so these immigrants can be provided with proper education. The youth centre I worked with was relatively new and was not working in collaboration with any other institutions. However, “effective partnerships creative ‘collaborative advantage’ (Huxham, 1996), by releasing synergy, exchanging information and ideas, improving decision-making, integrating provision across sectors and services and making more efficient use of facilities and staff time” (Benjamin et al., 2007). There are four different levels of partnerships; networking, coordination, cooperation and collaboration (Himmelman, 1996). Although the youth centre is not working in collaboration with any other institutions or youth centres, networking is possible because workers from one youth centre can stumble into workers from other youth centres and develop relationships of trust and willingness to share valuable information. In order to grow as an organization, carry out our duties efficiently, and achieve our goals, it is important to enter into a partnership agreement(s) with one or more institutions in the future. The youth centre would want to develop partnerships for crime and order, partnerships for physical, mental and sexual health, partnerships with residence providers, and local partnerships with educational institutions. A well discussed co-work agreement must be developed stating the aims and purpose, roles and responsibilities, frequency and purpose of meetings, codes of conduct, management structures, publicity and the nature and content of end of project review between the partners. (Benjamin et al., 2007) The youth centre or the other institution might want to collect data from funders or about factors affecting outcomes, therefore it is necessary to state how, when and by whom the data will be collected. It is crucial to decide which partner is responsible for what beforehand. Also, the role of young people in the partnership should be highlighted. If any problem arises, who should reported and who should report the problem should be specified. Equal credit should be given to all the partners when the collective goals are achieved. Especially because of the influx of young immigrants, it is important for the youth centre to coordinate and cooperate with schools, health care workers, detached youth worker coordinators, other facilities, and other youth centres to find out what the young people need as emphasized by Benjamin et al. (2007). Once all the youth workers in the area know what the young people require, it will be easier for them to coordinate with each other and provide a wider range of services without repetition. By forming partnerships with various other organizations and institutions, the youth centre will be acquainted with other problems faced by young people as well. The youth centre in turn can be a proactive participant in alleviating the young people of those problems. By networking with other institutions and organizations, the youth centre will be able to prioritize the services it provides. Inter-organization training of volunteers will be beneficial. Partnerships do not necessarily mean official agreements as stated before. Networking is the first level of partnership. Parents and relatives of the young people affected by youth centre’s efforts can be invited to events aimed at creating awareness and helping the isolated and vulnerable. While forming communal partnerships, it is important to make the representatives of these communities aware of their responsibilities and draft paperwork in simple language so the representatives do not have difficulty in understanding the clauses and refuse to take responsibility for their decisions later on. Even though partnerships have their advantages of cooperation, harmony, mutual respect, they have their disadvantages of competition, conflict, mistrust, funding issues, power struggles and unequal distribution of workload and publicity. It might be insensible to enter into partnership agreements with private companies. Private companies might try to take advantage of the youth centre because they consider young people, even children to be clients and they feel it is alright for them to exploit their clients. If the youth centre works with the police in order to reduce the prevalent crime rate, it is possible that the police can harass the young people involved by repeatedly checking whether they are offending. Given all the advantages and disadvantages of working in partnerships, it is important to note that it is impossible for an organization to isolate itself from the community it strives to benefit, therefore it has to find a way to survive and achieve its goals. Doing the right thing is not always easy and there will be numerous obstacles you will have to face. It should be noted that the concept of accountability is a rather wide one. An individual or a group of people will always have interest in the work you are doing, and you will always have a responsibility to report to that individual or that group of people. It is important to realize that you are not only accountable to other people but first and foremost, you are accountable to yourself. Other people you might be accountable to while working with young people include the people who use your services, the funders, the local authorities, parents and relatives of the people who use your services, neighbours in the community, social workers, professionals, your colleagues, and members of the local community. All of these people and you, yourself will expect the best outcome out of your work. Another important point to be noted is that it is not only the impression your work has on these people that matters, all of these people will have different reasons for showing interest in your work. Parents and relatives of the service users will care about the welfare of their loved ones whereas other organisations such as funders and local governments will care about the part of your work which caters to their individual and organizational concerns. Sometimes parents’ concerns might breach the confidentiality of the young people working at your organization. At the youth centre I worked at, monitoring and evaluation progress of work with young people was a high priority because the pressure from external stakeholders had increased over the years. It was not always easy to measure outcomes when it came to working with young people therefore it was important to plan our work in such a way that it was easy to record and report what we did. It was also very important to define learning and change within the community and the youth. In the youth centre, my colleagues and I would allocate our time according to the priority of the task assigned. Bu, as also discussed by Merton et al. (2007), it was also imperative to measure the impact our work had on the community. Even if the outcomes set out at the initiation of the programme were realized, it was possible for the programme to have positive and negative spill-over effects. Recognising and recording the impact of our work also enabled us to keep track of the changing needs of the young people, devise curriculum that aptly catered to these changing needs and assert the important of youth work in policy implications. This approach also helped us to remain focused on our goals. Sometimes, if there was a lot of work load, adhering to the recording and reporting process became tedious but we were aware that it was for the organization’s own good as emphasized by Merton et al. (2007). Apart from external pressures to keep track of our work’s progress, there were internal pressures as well. The fact that external stakeholders could have their own agendas that might not favour the youth centre’s own principles motivated everyone to keep track of progress and keep the work focused on benefitting young people. We kept track of the number of young people contacted and the number of sessions organized per month. However, a large number of sessions per month was not indicative of the success of the sessions. It was, therefore important to qualitatively measure the success of the sessions. We designed questionnaires and developed an online forum to monitor whether the young people were happy with what was being offered or not. It is imperative to keep track of not only the progress the programme is making but also the difficulties faced while organizing the programme. All this information was helpful in evaluating where the youth centre stood. References Benjamin, Cathy Curran, Sheila Harrison, Roger and Rob Hunter. Leading Work with Young People. London: SAGE Publications Inc., 2007. Himmelman, A.T. On the theory and practice of transformational collaboration: from social service to social justice in Huxham, C. (ed.), Creating Collaborative Advantage. London: SAGE Publications Inc., 1996. Johnson, G. And Scholes, K. Exploring Corporate Strategy: Text and Cases. 5th ed. Harlow: Pearson Educational, 2002. Merton, B., Comfort, H. and Payne, M. Recognising and recording the impact of youth work’, in Harrison, R., Benjamin, C., Curran, S. and Hunter, R. (eds) Leading Work with Young People. London: SAGE Publications Inc., 2007. Read More