YMCA is a leading provider of services to vulnerable young people seeking to divert them from crime and to engage them in developing their talents in more constructive ways. This is delivered through a wide range of programmes focusing in particular on prevention and early and effective intervention.
YMCA believes fervently in the potential of every young person to be a valued and constructive member of Scottish society. Where this is not happening YMCA will choose to intervene early, before behaviour becomes entrenched and while school can still provide an effective education.
YMCA also provides a wide range of services to young people who have already offended and to those struggling to cope with chaotic lifestyles. These services include support to families and parents equipping them to cope more effectively.
Through our network of community centres across Scotland YMCA staff and volunteers often know the young people as they grow up in their community. It is this non-judgemental relationship with the young person that opens doors for YMCA as they understand that we have only their very best interests at heart.
Some of these programmes will include:
• Mentoring
Recruiting, training and supporting volunteers to mentor vulnerable young people referred by the local authority as a concern. The volunteers will journey alongside the young person and their family helping them to make sense of the world and of relationships around them and connecting them to other supports and opportunities that can help. YMCA Plus One mentoring programmes operate in partnership with police and social work in several local authority areas. (See focus below)
• Issue-based Programmes
These programmes will engage young people who may be referred or who may self-refer around a particular issue of concern. This might for example be anger management, helping the young people to understand what triggers to avoid and how to manage certain situations. It could be education programmes such as drug education aiming to build knowledge and understanding of the risks among those who might experiment.
Whatever the issue the youth worker will provide a safe space for the young person to be honest about their behaviour and choices and to work towards a more constructive approach.
• Diversion
Lots of YMCA programmes will effectively engage young people who otherwise would have little to do and nowhere to go. Many YMCAs can be found inflating mobile football pitches on patches of grass or providing activities late on Friday or Saturday nights. Simply diverting and engaging young people in lots of imaginative ways makes a huge contribution to safe and healthy communities across Scotland.
FOCUS: 
History
In 2005 YMCA convened a discussion about the impact of the growing risk aversion pervading our society. It was concluded that the presentation of such policies, intended to serve children and young people, was in fact doing the exact opposite.
Advice to avoid groups of young people on the street, to avoid any physical contact, to call police and social work if there was a problem etc was creating a perception of problem young people and destroying informal engagement with young people in local communities.
In response YMCA Scotland established the Peebles Youth Trust in the Borders recruiting almost 150 local people who signed up to help where they could with children young people and families in need. From an early school partnership programme supporting young people excluded from school this project grew into a long term mentoring system working with children least likely to achieve their potential.
Over 30 children are served by trained volunteer mentors working alongside their parents and school to enable them to achieve their fullest potential. Children are referred by four local primary schools and after five years 100% of those originally referred remain stable at high school!
"...after five years 100% of those originally referred remain stable at high school!"
Plusone Mentoring
The success of the Borders project was merged with some great practice achieved in East Renfrewshire adapting a Danish model of early intervention with young people causing concern to statutory agencies. The merging of the two approaches brought the YMCA together with the Association of Directors of Social Work who were interested in exploring the building of capacity in local communities to support at risk young people.
This partnership grew as the Violence Reduction Unit brought a police interest in early diversion and re-engagement of young offenders. The final partner came in the form of the Scottish Government keen to watch the development of the model and happy to finance an evaluation to ensure reliable conclusions from a pilot.
A two year pilot was launched in 2009 creating three local delivery partnerships in Perth & Kinross, North Lanarkshire and Fife. Each local authority contributed to costs of a programme manager employed by the local YMCA and tasked with recruiting and training mentors and coordinating the relationships.
The local authority referral group identified young people whose behaviour was becoming a real concern. This often included offending behaviour and each referral presented evidence of a number of risk factors reinforcing the concern. The process for identification of the most appropriate young people for the intervention was designed in partnership with Professor Bill Whyte at Edinburgh University.
A selection procedure and contact with the family then leads to matching with a trained volunteer mentor and 20 mentoring relationships were established in each location. The programme completed its two years in summer 2011 with a full independent evaluation now available, carried out by Dundee University. The evaluation of the programme also included completion of a Social Return on Investment (SROI) calculation which provides a good insight into the savings made by this approach both in terms of money and time.
Some of the headlines from the evaluations include:
"ADSW, YMCA, police, Scottish Government, academics and local authorities have worked together as joint architects of this new model of early intervention - investing in each others' strengths and producing results beyond those that even we had hoped for."
Andrew Lowe, President of the Association of Directors of Social Work
The plusone mentoring model has been widely acknowledged to be best practice in diverting young people at risk away from the criminal justice system. It is effective in evidencing efficiency savings and in building community capacity reflecting the ambition of the Christie Commission to engage local communities in service provision.
In 2011 the programme approach was recognised by the police through its posting on their best practice national UK website.
In 2011/12 YMCA Scotland is working with Scottish Government to replicate the model in Scotland.