In April a group of Association colleagues, Janet Batsleer, Tania de St Croix, Kevin Jones and Christine Smith invited people to join them in contributing diary entries as youth workers to the ‘Mass Observation Archive’ at Sussex University. Colleagues undertook this in a personal and volunteer capacity, from the grassroots, as concerned citizens seeking to capture and record for the archive a sense of what is is like to be a youth worker at this moment in time. It forms part of the wider study of the everyday life of citizens which Mass Observation undertakes.

An account of this exercise, its history and the early outcomes from evaluating the data are being published through ‘Youth and Policy’ online. You can access the first of two articles as follows:

Article 1: A Citizen Enquiry into the Lives of Youth Workers in the time of Covid-19 (An introduction)

Article 2: Youth Work in a Time of Covid – July and August diaries: We Are Seeing the Value of Youth Work.