44: Youth work

I am a middle class white woman in my thirties. I recently took on an interim leadership role leading a youth organisation. Most of the young people who are part of the organisation are black. Two of the senior youth workers in the project who have been part of the project since its inception are young black men in their mid twenties. They have grown up in the area where the project is based. The youth project is commissioned by the local authority to provide youth services. I’d heard about a recent meeting before I had started between the local authority and our organisation where we had been invited to share the progress of our project. A senior male white leader had gone to attend this meeting and had taken the two senior youngish male black youth workers. When they turned up at the council offices, the senior white female council lead had said she didn’t want the two young black men to attend the meeting and asked them to stay in the waiting room. The white male leader from our organisation expressed dismay, citing that the youth workers had front line expertise and experience that was invaluable for them to share and one of them had been recently promoted to a very senior role. The more senior black youth worker was allowed to attend and the other black youth worker had to stay in the waiting room. The council lead did not respond well to the black youth worker in the meeting who was quite informal in his approach. This was the context and background when I started my role and organised a repeat meeting with the council. The board of trustees of my organisation decided it would be best to just send me as a representative together with two other senior white leaders. This was not explicitly based on race, but rather that they thought that it best to send staff who the council would respond well to. This was justified by the fact that we were unsure if we were going to be commissioned on an ongoing basis. The decision was supposedly based on our seniority, experience and approach, but in reality this could be separated out from the fact we were white. The senior black youth worker was gracious. He said the most important thing was that we got commissioned so he was willing to duck out of this meeting. However, I felt horrible and complicit the whole time I was in the meeting. I knew exactly how to play the game to say and come across the way the council lead would like me to, in a way that made me seem nice, educated and trustworthy. But I knew it was all at the expense of playing into their prejudices about how I was different to the black youth workers who she could not identify with. Ultimately, a team of white people attending a meeting to represent a black organisation and not actively pushing for black representation was unacceptable.