Basics of working with youth on public spaces and different approaches

Working with youth on public spaces also known as street work with youth belongs to a professional field of outreach work. Street work with youth is gaining more recognition in Slovenia as more street work activities are taking place. It represents a different way of implementing educational and social-integrational activities. Street work with youth takes place outside of institutions, on public spaces, in the living space of a young person’s life. It is an approach that is focused on an individual, respecting his or her autonomy which leads to activities that are based on addressing interests, needs and struggles of youth. Street work is a way of how workers can come up to participants and offer support in the participant’s environment. With street work we can reach young people that are facing different challenges or problems growing up, or belong into so called marginalised groups of young people and spend their free time on public spaces. In this thesis I have explored the characteristics of street work with youth, the different forms of it and the positive and negative aspects of street work comparing to institutional approaches. Because of the lack of Slovenian literature concerning this subject, I was interested in which forms of street work with are the ones that are being conducted in Slovenia. I also wanted to know what the main actors of street work in Slovenia think about their approaches and how do they transfer them in to the theoretic framework