Counseling Practices in Outreach Youth Work

With the increasing professionalisation of the field of action and the improved qualification of professionals, the topic of counselling in open youth work (OJA) has become very important. The demand and need for counselling among young users of OYC is increasing and system partners and Funding Partners are expected to have specialist and professional expertise. Uncertain setting factors, atypical counselling processes and intervention conditions that first need to be established make counselling practices special.

Although counselling is provided in open youth work and is in great demand from young users, there is hardly any research on it. There are also hardly any quality criteria, professional concepts on the forms and requirements of counselling or empirical findings on counselling practices in open and low-threshold settings. Exceptions can be found in mobile youth work, which has integrated counselling into its quality descriptions, and in online counselling, which has already identified its quality criteria.

The project ties in with the quality debates within the framework of the EU Youth Strategy and fulfils important demands for innovation and quality-assured youth work. The planned strategic partnership between bOJA, the nationwide network for open youth work in Austria, the AGJF - Arbeitsgemeinschaft Jugendfreizeitstätten, Baden-Württemberg e.V. and the Hochschule Campus Wien aims to further professionalise open youth work (OJA) by researching an increasingly important service area of the field of action in order to identify perspectives for further development on this basis.