I must be honest, I thought the creation of the PCC role was a ‘tough on crime’ ruse too far and didn’t support it. However, when I heard that Ann Barnes was intent on creating a post for a young person to assist her, I was pleased. Here was a newly-minted public official walking the talk about engaging with young people by actually offering a paid role for a young person to assist with her work. What’s not to like?

Because for years, many of us have been arguing for and implementing participation strategies devoted to bringing young people into decision-making in a meaningful way, providing roles with clear responsibilities, accountability, influence and the opportunity to see the full extent of that influence in action.

As a crusty old youth worker, my allegiances are with Paulo Freire. I’m committed to the voluntary principle, the bringing together of young people to engage with their environment and their communities, to be social actors and citizens.

When I first started working on participation in the voluntary sector and local government, a lot of people still needed convincing that young people ought to have a say in anything at all. This despite the fact that John Major’s government, to his credit, had signed the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, thereby committing the UK to its Article 12 (the right to express a view and have it taken into account), years before. I remember plenty of sticky sessions with professionals who, despite working with children and young people, rather resisted the idea of sharing any kind of power with them.

It’s pleased me that in the ten years since I left that role, it is now entirely normal for services in both the voluntary and public sectors that work with children and young people routinely to involve them in decision-making of one kind or another. Inevitably, the type and quality of this engagement can be patchy, but it’s there,  and that is progress.

So it was with a very heavy heart that I watched Paris Brown’s demise, not least because the vitriol poured upon her head was not motivated by the Daily Mail’s loathing of racism and homophobia (and there is no argument from me that the content of Paris’s tweets were offensive and unpleasant); instead it was a gleefully uncovered opportunity to kick what it perceives as a silly, politically correct notion – that young people can contribute and should have a voice. If you don’t believe me, read Melanie Phillips in their pages.

The lessons for our sector are three-fold:

1) Keep involving young people in your organisations. Get them into roles that develop their skills and improve your services. Reward them.

2) Protect your young people. Paris Brown’s experience shows that as far as some corners of the media are concerned, anyone is fair game. If you have young people in high-profile roles, prepare them for public scrutiny, support them and get in front of any stories. Ann Barnes did well but in the end, the scrutiny and vitriol was too much for Paris.

3) Work with all your young people to help them understand and manage their digital life. That’s not a ‘personal-branding’ suggestion, it’s a ‘help young people deal confidently with an environment that can be scary and exposing’ suggestion.

Help them develop the skills to protect themselves and express themselves.

Comic Relief supports projects both in the UK and abroad. It trumpets, quite rightly, the work it does at home. It emphasises its quest for social justice and the relief of poverty through its work. After Children in Need’s success in raising a record total even in dire economic times, I expect Comic Relief will do well this year.

But we, in Britain, are a contradictory bunch.

If you ask us as a nation, we will tell you that there are too many scroungers and skivers who are bleeding the state dry with their demands for housing benefit and new homes for their football-team-sized families. We’ll overestimate the numbers who try to cheat the benefits system and the amounts of cash they get away with. We’ll tell you that immigrants get all the jobs and houses and hundreds of pounds a week in benefits that are unavailable to “British people” (there was a Facebook post with some absurd figures doing the rounds a while ago). We’ll also tell you that there are lots of people out there who are pretending to be disabled in order to get more money, a house, a parking permit. Even Department of Work and Pensions minister Lord Freud thinks having a guide dog is “a lifestyle choice”.

And yet, every Children in Need, every Comic or Sport Relief, our deeply empathic side comes rolling out. The nation goes fun-running, sponsored walking and bean-bathing with abandon. Comic and Sport Relief clearly emphasise their work in the UK as well as abroad; Children in Need raises money for projects only in Britain. So we know we’re raising money for disadvantaged children, young people and families here. This confuses me. If we’re so convinced that most people (not us) that are in receipt of some kind of benefit (or who are simply poor), are undeserving swine who are on the fiddle, for whom are we raising all this cash?

More cognitive dissonance is on display in David Cameron’s decision to appear with One Direction in their Comic Relief single. Is it not absurd for the Prime Minister to participate in a campaign that raises money for people who, some might say (I couldn’t possibly comment), are disadvantaged because of his government’s policies?

Surely this level of depoliticisation is incredibly unhelpful, throwing weight behind a notion that poverty and disadvantage exist inevitably and there is nothing we can do about them, except have a sponsored bake-off?

Dig a little deeper, however, and it’s clear that these large campaigns lead to funding for small, important projects that do extraordinary work. They fund projects that would struggle to raise money from the public if they campaigned for them individually. We’ve always known there’s a hierarchy of giving and that donkeys, cats and dogs are at the top. With its funding, Comic Relief supports projects for destitute asylum seekers (we make them that way, folks!) and young people with drug and alcohol addictions. These are projects that depend enormously on this support.

So it seems to me that we’re content with this odd state of affairs, willing to believe that most jobless people are on the fiddle while feeling sentimental about kids growing up in poverty. What a peculiar bunch we are. But what saddens me most is that there is no challenge to this duality of position.

Imagine if Richard Curtis and Emma Freud put their considerable influence and power behind a campaign showing us that poverty and disadvantage could be alleviated by political willpower!

In late November, my father-in-law died. I hope it’s not indulgent to mention it but I have decided to because throughout his illness and treatment, my partner’s family received extraordinary support, help and kindness from MacMillan nurses and the local hospice.

It was the best of the voluntary sector on display; on the one hand a large organisation able to support and advise because of high-profile national fundraising, on the other a local service, supported by individuals and groups in the area, at the end of the phone on a difficult, terrible night.

It got me thinking about giving and the choices we make when we decide to donate. As someone who has always worked in the sector, I’ve given a small amount to charities that I liked. I have never donated to a charity I’ve worked for but tried to spread the love.

Over the last year, I’ve given a few pounds a month to Stonewall because I like the work they’re doing on homophobic bullying in schools. More recently, a persuasive doorstep fundraiser squeezed some pennies from me for the Children’s Society, impressing me with her knowledge of the charity’s work in my region.

But I’ve had a rethink. These are hard times.

Despite the government’s bluster, the truth about the impact of ‘welfare reform’ is slowly coming out. We will see 200,000 more children living in poverty. This is as unacceptable as it is a moral outrage. Even more so when we learn that, since the crash of 2008, the richest just keep on getting richer.

So I want to support organisations that help the neediest and most vulnerable while campaigning for an improvement in their lot.

Children living in poverty become vulnerable young people. Without action, without a determination to stem the tide of the government’s attack on the least well-off, we will pay later. Most importantly, they will pay. And it will be a heavy and life-long price.

That’s why I will be donating as much as I can afford to the Child Poverty Action Group. Perhaps you should too?

This was always the danger of an increase in the numbers of charities delivering government contracts or receiving direct funding to support government objectives in a particular area of policy. Plenty of us have written about it, plenty of times. It can lead to outright silence on an issue, but more commonly it is a watering down of language so as not to offend the paymasters. And it is not only the big boys who are subject to it -  small charities delivering local services are probably most at risk; a contract with a local authority service can be a lifeline to a tiny, specialist charity that struggles to raise funding elsewhere.

So, if we all think it (94 per cent is a pretty convincing figure) and we clearly have something to say, then what are we going to do about it?

My concern is for young people. Increasingly, their life chances are coming under attack. They are on the receiving end of an ever-sharpening stick.

While unemployment amongst 16-24 year olds has dropped to 957,000, the number without work for more than a year has risen once again. Of those, many are in low-paid or unstable part-time work. Education Maintenance Allowance is gone for those who might previously have gone on to further education; tuition fees feel like an insurmountable barrier to those who could consider higher education.

Specialist youth services have been cut across the country with an average nine youth work positions per authority being deleted. Careers support is patchy with the responsibility for its delivery falling to schools once again since September.

Support services for families, including those with disabled children are being decimated, leading to falling levels of intervention and support for children and young people who need it most.

The apprenticeships which are much trumpeted as a solution to youth unemployment have been going to far too many 25-year-olds who are already in employment – a shady practice that’s been around for a while, amounting to easy money for training ‘providers’. The numbers of 16-year-olds walking into high quality apprenticeships are woeful.

The under 25s were under furious attack last week with the government floating, once more, (the Prime Minister sent this balloon up in June) a plan to remove housing benefit for this age group. Rhetoric was frilly, full of tales of young people leaving the family home to walk straight into a flat, financed by you the taxpayer. All nonsense, a ridiculous plan and terminally ill-thought through. Take out the young parents, care leavers, vulnerable young adults and you end up with very few young scroungers to pick on. And in the case of the young parents, could any government comfortably remove the financial support of babies without feeling some blowback?

Young people’s educational opportunities are targeted as schools shift further towards academies and free schools, offering a narrow, centrally-approved curriculum of Ebacc qualifications and history that’ll learn you every king and queen since Ethelred, while the chance to study art, drama, music or even design and technology is pushed to the margins. On top of that, the modules and coursework that helped many students achieve are abandoned in favour of all-or-nothing end of year exams.

And while all this is going on, this week we learn that legitimate tax avoidance allows a company like Starbucks to pay the exchequer no income tax at all over the last three years, despite clocking up £1.2bn in UK sales. At the same time, evidence emerges of links between Conservative Party donors and the companies that are awarded public sector contracts to deliver some of our most cherished services.

I’m wondering if you can read this parade of grimness that our young people are facing and not be furious about it? I expect you are furious about it. And it is true that many individual charities are speaking out on ‘their issues’.

But this is not about single issue threads that need addressing. This is a tidal wave of hurt and it is, without doubt, going to cause the largest amount of pain to an entire generation that we have seen since the early 1980s.

So, back to the poll. It’s too hard to speak out. The money we take from the government ensures the survival of our organisations. To speak out would be to jeopardise ourselves. Are those the arguments?

Well, I have two responses:  It’s not about you, and now the pressure that is being brought to bear on our youngest and most vulnerable has reached this level, you have a moral obligation to speak out. Together. In anger.

On 20 October, the TUC and other organisations will be marching in London to protest against current economic policy. Do you know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see our biggest children and young people’s charities at the front of that march, holding the banner.

Because it’s not about us.

Barnardo’s, that consistent defender of disadvantaged and vulnerable children and young people, has partnered up with “chicken-based quick service” restaurant giant KFC, once but no longer known as Kentucky Fried Chicken. They have been piloting a programme of training and work placements in the North West for Barnardo’s service users, it’s gone very well,  so now the national roll-out is announced.

What sounds brilliant about this partnership is that KFC is well known for its staff training and development programme; they have pathways for their workers that can lead to degree-level qualifications. They have shaped their training to help young people who are very vulnerable to move into a working environment, building their confidence while providing transferable skills,  and they have clearly created something that has worked very well. Their publicity includes testimony from young people who have gone through the programme and benefited enormously. I’m happy for them.

But, I have to confess to my unease as I read about it.

Let’s get the first thing out of the way. Stop me if you’ve heard it, but no private company of that size gets into corporate social responsibility activity and partnering with charities without a really strong business case, whether it’s sales or workforce. We all know that, so let’s put it to one side.

No, my first reaction was a sigh that Barnardo’s chose to partner with a fast-food company. We all know that rates of obesity amongst children and young people are rising and that poor and disadvantaged communities have more fast food outlets than their better-off neighbours. Disadvantaged young people in this country are being harmed by poor diet, so is it wise to partner with one the world’s largest producers of processed food?

And then I thought about the environmental impact of some of these very large fast food companies. KFC has hired Edelman to manage their reputation in Australia after accusations that its paper products are sourced from protected rainforest and, perhaps inevitably, the company is under constant attack by those who accuse it of animal cruelty – something KFC refutes with gusto.

Then I felt a bit depressed and wondered if we really ought to be aspiring to training and work experience for disadvantaged young people in a wider range of companies and organisations, not just the food service industry. Was it possible that this is another example of low aspirations in action? Fortunately, I could cheer myself by thinking about From Care2Work’s partnership with Marriott Hotels.

I think the thing that bothered me most was the gnawing feeling that the response to my unease would be the well-founded argument that, in a time of appalling youth unemployment, any job training – any job – is a good thing, and we shouldn’t be sniffy about from where those opportunities come, so long as a fair wage is being paid.

And here’s the thing: despite my unease, I’m concluding that it’s true, perhaps there are times when we stretch our values a little. Just one proviso though, I still get to argue for something better.

For Serco, of course, this kind of project is an obvious move: a secure government contract with a veneer of corporate social responsibility through partnering with the third sector.

Serco’s involvement in such a partnership raises a number of questions. We know from the recent Olympic security fiasco that G4S had still expected to receive its £50million ‘management fee’, despite its extraordinary organisational errors. So what financial guarantees are there for Serco in its joint bid with some of the most well-known children’s and young people’s charities? The charities involved will certainly take some funding to their “centres” to fund their core functions: can we assume it will be much less than Serco?

Of course there have always been partnerships between the voluntary and private sectors and they offer significant benefits to both parties. For charities, the endorsement and support of a significant brand can bring a huge boost to income. For the brands, although it’s never explicit, involvement with a major charity is always part of a strategy to increase profits. But these relationships are not about co-delivering a contract.

This collaboration with Serco is a different kind of partnership and it reflects the direction of travel for all sorts of public service delivery. Let’s not forget that when the government announced the National Citizen Service, it was to exemplify the Big Society agenda, the coming together of the voluntary sector to deliver better, more targeted interventions for young people. But Serco is not the third sector, it exists to make a profit. We are moving into territory that is shifting yet again.

More than that, the NCS was trumpeted as a more liberal-minded alternative to national military service, a way to sort out errant and aimless young people by giving them something structured to do. But the NCS was funded at the expense of existing youth service provision across the country and at much greater per capita cost, something some of the partners involved in this new shared endeavour raised when they appeared at the Education Select Committee in January 2011.

The common response to this argument is that those of us who make it must realise that this is “the real world” and we should live in it like everyone else. No doubt those organisations now working with Serco, who gave evidence at the select committee, would argue that this partnership is the only way to support the work they themselves argued already existed and was cheaper.

And this is the problem. The government shifts the goal posts so that funding sources for the existing, effective, evidenced work created over time by these organisations disappear, forcing them to participate in the government’s own ideological pet project.

Finding themselves only able to support their work through the government’s own favoured project, they are no longer able to criticise it but instead must argue that it is the best possible way to support young people throughout the country.

It is an exemplary political move on the part of the government but it is deeply harmful to the third sector. Not least because it inevitably leads to the doorstep of yet another gigantic, corporate monster, sucking its profit from our very own back pockets, while failing to support the future of the third sector as a movement.

These are temporary positions in security at the Olympics, recruited at the last minute in order to save money. Most of the people applying for these roles can only expect to get four weeks work from them, then they’ll be back to signing on.

The G4S debacle is a stark illustration of an economy full of fixed-term, temporary, low-paid jobs with poor training. If these are the jobs being offered to young people, what view are they forming of what a good, secure job looks like?

We are in dangerous territory if young people don’t even recognise that the conditions they are being asked to work under are unacceptable, or they simply don’t expect to get a better deal. Maybe they fear losing a job it took them months to find.

It’s also emerged that the cleaning company with the main contract for the Olympic Park, is housing its mostly foreign cleaning staff in bunk bed dormitories with up to 75 sharing a shower and then charging them for the accommodation. That’s quite a step on from requiring workers to pay for the uniform they are obliged to wear during work hours.

Dignity in work is disappearing. If these are the conditions available in entry-level employment, who would choose it? What incentive is there to work at all? Everything those of us who are slightly longer of tooth took for granted – regular and limited hours, good levels of pay, safety at work, fair treatment – is not on offer for those that follow behind us.

It’s called the ‘flexible workforce’ but it means cheap, disposable labour and exploitation. There are too many part-time jobs and too many ‘zero hours’ contracts, too many unreasonable shift-patterns and not enough protection at work.

So, what can the third sector do about it?

We must offer work placements, volunteering experiences and jobs that show young people that it is possible to work without being exploited, that there is dignity in a working life and that they should expect to be treated fairly and well in their job. Equally, they should work in a safe environment and not be put at risk from overwork or dangerous conditions.

We should reflect on our heritage of campaigning for safety at work, fair pay and limited working hours. It is in the DNA of the charitable and trade union sector. And it is our responsibility to carry that inheritance forward, ensuring that the opportunities we offer to our young people, provide dignity and fairness at work.

If we must model it for the über-corporations, then so be it.

I’ve been worried for a long time that the sector’s charities have been drifting too far from their campaigning and fundraising roots and into service delivery. What started out in the sector as an interesting stroll down a path towards the creation of diverse public service partners has opened up into a gigantic free-for-all. Predictably, the sector is now populated with social enterprises, social businesses, community interest companies and others, all willing to be in receipt of the state’s dollar to deliver our public services. And they are all competing with the charities that paved the way through the Compact.

Public service delivery is now a vast and open market. Ask Serco.

But when the large children and young people’s charities prefer to call themselves ‘social businesses’ in order to compete in this overcrowded marketplace, we move inexorably into territory where charitable purpose becomes meaningless and even undesirable.

For vulnerable and disadvantaged young people this is not good news. As we have seen with the Work Programme, the need to meet targets in order to justify or even receive funding for a service, leads to the people with the most complex needs being ignored. They are those who cannot be ‘resolved’ or moved on quickly and inexpensively.

So if charities stop thinking like charities entirely, who will be there for the most disadvantaged, those most in need of the long-term, expensive solutions? And who will take the time to set up and fund the types of projects that have less tangible outcomes, like those devoted to raising young people’s self-esteem or engaging them in the arts?

That problem speaks to a wider issue. We are told that in a time of austerity, those ‘fluffy’ projects with ‘soft’ outcomes cannot be prioritised. Projects that help young people get to know themselves, identify their talents and abilities and begin to explore them, projects that help them manage their relationships or develop their communication skills and ability to work with others – these are difficult to fund, hard to justify.

And yet, it is these skills, dispositions and aptitudes that will help our young people navigate the years to come and the barriers we have left in the road.

Charities must not forget their roots. Yes, funding is hard to come by and contracts with government offer an attractive source of reliable income. But let’s not forget who we are and why we came here.

Young people under the age of sixteen are now prevented from walking the streets of Bangor town centre at night, unless a responsible adult is with them.

The Education Secretary is to consult on the reintroduction of O Levels and CSEs, meaning that young people would have the limit of their ability to achieve determined for them at the age of thirteen.

The number of young people aged 16-18 who are not in education, employment or training, rose again in the last quarter.

It’s getting harder and harder to be young. Charities have a job to do and it is at the side of the children and young people who need us.

I had been mulling the role of the frontline practitioner working with young people and how they are the conduits through which any service is delivered. Thinking on this and the focus on educational attainment of my presentation, I wrote: “You have a duty to be curious”.

My point was to suggest that young people in and leaving care need us to model the qualities and characteristics we want them to develop. We were talking about fostering a love of learning in young people and supporting the development of high aspirations but we weren’t talking about how we do that for ourselves.

So “you have a duty to be curious” sort of fell out of my head, framed in those terms because the language of duties is so familiar to all of us working with vulnerable young people, and because I felt it was both pleasingly whimsical and incredibly important.

I still believe it and it’s never been far from one of my presentations since. It’s not just relevant to young people in and leaving care either. Vulnerable and disadvantaged young people often have a very complex or disrupted educational experience and this can lead to a failure to engage with learning for its own sake, never mind to acquire a handful of GCSEs.

As adults working with these groups, we need to look at our own engagement with the world, our openness to new ideas or knowledge, our willingness to explore and ask questions, to critically appraise. If we don’t do these things ourselves, how can we help young people re-engage with school or discover an enthusiasm for learning? We must model it for them, help them see that curiosity about the world.

There’s a link, of course, between a critical mind that is asking questions and an engagement with the political process. We’re getting better at helping young people get involved in decision-making about the services they receive but there are still places where this is done badly or not at all. We should do more to build that link and help young people realise their role as social actors in our political culture.

Carl Sagan, the renowned astrophysicist, was a great believer in the importance of asking questions. He was clear that an enquiring mind was fundamentally linked to the preservation of democracy. In his final television interview before his death in 1996, he said:

“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.

If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along.”

So many of us in the voluntary sector are working with vulnerable and disadvantaged young people, whether we are delivering a statutory duty or not. If our role is to help them develop into the happy, engaged, educated and secure adults we want them to be, we must show them what one looks like. That means we must not step back from important questions or our own engagement with politics. 

Carl had a point, don’t you think?

A toxic combination of factors, not least our nose-diving economy, the removal of the Education Maintenance Allowance and the tripling of tuition fees in higher education, is making it near-impossible to get an economic foothold. Add to this the government’s war on vocational learning and many young people must be wondering what’s out there for them.

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing in the media over youth unemployment as each month’s figures come out and even Nick Clegg has been making more noise about his Youth Charter, aware that concern is growing that we are seeing a new lost generation emerge.

But where are the young people?

Since the EMA protests last year, the voices of young people have gone very quiet. Perhaps they have been cowed by the failure to prevent the loss of EMA or the aftermath of the August riots which led to sentences for some that were four times longer than for others prosecuted for equivalent crimes in 2010.

So are our young people resigned to their cris de coeur going unheard?

The public debate on young people is fraught with contradiction. Nick Clegg offers help and there is sympathy for the lack of work while at the same time, Iain Duncan Smith labels the young as X Factor obsessed “job snobs” who think shelf-stacking for dole with expenses is beneath them.

There are many strong child and young people focused charities who have been dutifully writing press releases and letters to the papers about the struggles their charges, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are facing. But, it’s time for the young people-led organisations to step up to the mic and for the bigger youth charities to put their beneficiaries front and centre.

Let’s see some young people out there in the press talking about the impact of these appalling circumstances and the ad hominem attacks that young people are enduring from politicians and papers alike.

I know there are young people out there who are brave and articulate, who have something to say about their lives, who without doubt need the platform to say it.

So come on UK Youth Parliament and others – stop planning your golden futures as hot-shot young political operatives. Get out there with your young comrades and make a stink.