Manual to work with young offenders and non formal education

Aims of the tool

To improve the quality of the non formal education activities that are being organized with young offenders in prison contexts.

Description of the tool

The idea of collecting examples of youth work practice with this particular group of young people came from the experience of EUROACCION NGO, the Spanish organization that was working in the Prison of Campos del Río in Murcia providing various educational activities to young people who were in detention for both petty and serious offences. Within some 12 months the group of youth workers have developed an interesting number of different activities and methods to work with this target in such context like prisons and they became convinced that these resources could be combined with others from other organizations and together could define a powerful syllabus for other people to work with. While preparing for their work they noticed that there is a limited number of resources available therefore they needed to start from the scratch.
This is how the idea of the Youth Matters Now (YOMN) project has appeared - the project that would deal with the issue the social inclusion of young offenders, ex-offenders or at risk of offending. The project had the following objectives:
Youth workers from 5 countries – Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Spain met twice in order to share their practices of work with young offenders and discuss the content of this manual. Little did they know it would be a challenging process; the variety of and differences in approaches, different understandings of youth work in prisons, very different experience did not make the work easy.

This manual doesn’t aim at being a complete guide on how to work with young people in detention, it is rather meant to provide tools, methodologies, practices and approaches that can be used with young offenders, ex-offenders and people at risk of offending in closed, open and semi-open institutions in order to:
OBJECTIVES OF YOMN
To facilitate mutual learning processes as well as the exchange of experiences and best practices among European NGOs in the field of social inclusion of young offenders, ex-offenders or at risk of offending.
To compile and systematize those experiences and activities of non-formal education with young offenders, ex-offenders or at risk of offending in order to further develop a brief guide on youth work within the prison context.
To promote non formal learning methodologies for working with young offenders, ex-offenders or at risk of offending.
To promote the European cooperation and the development of future projects among the members of the network.
Learning Objectives:

 Prevent further offence
 Advice young people in matters of their interest
 Mentor and support
 Accompany young people in self-discovery and building self-confidence
 Inspire youth workers who work with young offenders