Therapeutic Youth Work through Sports Practice is a young person centred, trauma informed and healing centred practice. Therapeutic Youth Work through Sports Practice is a community practice rather than a clinical practice. The workshop will introduce the learner to the concepts and considerations that can build Social Health and Wellbeing into their thinking and practice.

Utilising the relational practice of Youth Work alongside the Doorstep Sport approaches, to develop trusted relationships, which enable young people from intersectional lower social economic contexts and conditions to access and enjoy sport, physical activity and movement.

Therapeutic Youth Work through Sports Practice is framed around developing the conscious approach of REACH and provides a counter narrative ‘too hard to reach’. REACH stands for

• Relationships,
• Environments,
• Activities,
• Conversations and Healing,

and invites the practitioner to look at their Attitudes, Approaches, Beliefs and Behaviours to positively disrupt the Context, Conditions and Commitment to Change (ABC’s) that inhibit or enable young people’s access and enjoyment of sport, physical activity and movement.

Pre-course E-Learning

Module 1: An introduction to therapeutic youth work for sports practitioners (Hour E-Learning)

Module 2: Intersectional discrimination (Hour E-Learning)

Module 3: Trauma and the body’s response (Hour E-Learning)

Module 4: REACH model in practice (day face-face)

Aims of this workshop:

• To introduce the R.E.A.C.H. framework and its role in therapeutic youth work through sport.
• To build practitioners’ confidence in creating trusting, safe and inclusive relationships with young people.
• To recognise participation barriers and explore trauma‑informed, equitable approaches to overcome them.
• To develop the ability to design therapeutic environments and activities that support regulation and wellbeing.
• To strengthen skills in having purposeful, strengths‑based therapeutic conversations.
• To explore healing‑centred practices that promote agency, hope and positive growth.

Who is this for: Project managers, project leads, system change partners & deliverers, practitioners

Additional Information: An active interest in changing the current system to support a change anchored in hope and healing, through relational practice.

And Someone to Talk To: The Role Of Therapeutic Youth Work – Youth & Policy

CONTENT CAUTION: These modules include topics that some learners may find sensitive or emotionally challenging.

Most of the content is outward facing towards our practice with young people, with some reflections on ourselves. It is important that practitioners are in a good place themselves regarding their own experiences and have support around them, in order that they feel able to do this work when supporting young people. This is not intended to undermine experience, more to reiterate the emotional literacy and positionality of the practitioner doing this work.

Cost: £1800