As one strand of its remit, over the last five years Community Resolve has been working in central Bristol with young people caught up in conflict. We provide intense groupwork and 1-1 support to young men and women caught up in hard-end conflict, often around gang membership, and this work has inevitably led to work with parents, either because of their teenage children in the youth justice system, or as young parents or parents-to-be.
We are currently:
- Supporting parents of young people caught up in the youth justice system through involvement with gangs
- Recruiting, training and working with Black men as parenting role models for their communities, through ongoing regular groups where their concerns and thoughts are shared
- Running 4-6 weeks courses with young mothers and fathers (as well as future young parents) around managing the internal and external conflicts that come with parenthood – role models, working with families, negotiating relationships with ex’s, challenging negative racial stereotypes linked to parenthood (see more below).
- Working with young men on issues such as masculinity, relationship to society, relationship to partners and family
Work we hope to deliver in the near future includes:
- Training young mothers as peer educators for other young women around issues of relationships, communication, conflict, pregnancy and motherhood
- Establishing an intergenerational mediation service to work between parents and teenagers, using young people previously involved in the projects above
- Working alongside counsellors to support young people as they reveal serious experiences and concerns in in-depth groupwork – domestic abuse, drug abuse, encounters with weapons and serious violence, intimidating peer pressure.
Case study: Young Fathers Group (by Waheed Ahmed, Youth Conflict Worker)
There has been a growing recognition that services that cater for young parents often tend to focus purely on mothers. Where services do also aim to support young fathers, they often struggle to find ways to do this effectively. Our project aims to support young men by providing opportunities to explore their experiences of fatherhood addressing issues such as masculinity, self-esteem, child development, education and training. In this social group, young fathers can discuss problems and support each other in an informal setting; by creating an understanding of parenthood, and how young fathers can be role models for their children and the wider community as a whole. We aim to train the young fathers/potential fathers to be more confident in bringing up their children with using different models and taking into account social, physical, spiritual, mental and economic rights of passage.