How does community-based support enable youth activism?

For youth in low-income neighbourhoods in Scotland, multiple crises have deepened existing poverty and inequalities. The increasing educational attainment gap causes many young people to leave school with no positive destination. Young people report that their neighbourhoods are not good places to live due to a lack of affordable housing and sustainable jobs. Further, youth from low-income neighbourhoods are often pathologized and further marginalised for their lack of economic and civic participation. Meanwhile, the local resources available to disadvantaged young people are being eroded. State-funded youth provision has been cut, with responsibility for youth delivery devolved to community-based organisations that are themselves frequently victim to precarious employment and funding.
Within this challenging landscape, pockets of potentially transformative relational work support young people to develop agency and voices for social change. Youth work organisations deploy a range of creative youth-led activities focused on promoting youth voice and developing participation opportunities for marginalised youth. Using holistic, trauma-informed and situated approaches, youth workers build responsive and trusting relationships with young people. This paper explores the potential for transformation offered within such settings, given the limitations such organisations have to address structural inequalities. Based on a research project in Scotland exploring the question, ‘What are the barriers and enablers to working-class youth activism?’, we employed qualitative in-depth interviews and focus groups with youth activists across three youth organisations to examine the role of identities, intersectional inequalities, activity types and resources in supporting disadvantaged young people to develop agency and voice towards action for change.