ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of the youth worker in relation to the local community. It offers a series of steps to embed community engagement into your youth work placement and practice more generally. The chapter examines an approach that deepens one understanding of the neighbourhood's one work in as important sites for young people. The general theory is called political communitarianism, which takes the ideal of community and offers 'prescriptions about the political and social institutions that could realise this ideal'. Policy makers, politicians and practitioners tend to think of community as more than mere territory and beyond simple interactions and encounters. The initiatives such as citizenship education, volunteering projects and detached youth work have long been seen as strategies for instilling a greater sense of responsibility in young people towards their local community. A process used by Nottingham Citizens, an alliance of organisations that uses the tools of community organising to identify and take action on needs.
