‘The cultivation of gifts in all directions’: thinking about purpose

What should be the main purposes of youth work? In this chapter, Dod Forrest addresses this question by presenting a model of youth work as aprocess that linkspersonal development, group work, collective association and social movements for radical change. While, like earlier chapters, this stresses the importance of relationships it also emphasises the place of community in young people’s lives and the need for youth work to possess a social action dimension.