Peißenberg: Street worker demands more places for young people in need!

Peißenberg: Street worker demands more places for young people in need!

The young people in Peißenberg face a remarkable challenge: They want places to stay where they can spend their free time undisturbed. A year ago, the market council increased the working hours of street worker Elisa Finsterer from 5.25 to 13 hours per week in order to better meet this demand. At the most recent meeting of the main committee, the positive effects of this increase were discussed, which led to more contacts and more intensive support offers. But despite this progress, Finsterer emphasizes that the 13 hours are not enough to cover all of the young people's concerns.

Especially in the period before Christmas, which is a “crisis time” for many young people, a number of young people have already dropped out of their vocational training. The situation highlights the clear need for more places to stay and a wider choice of contact points, especially for those who do not have a safe home. Finsterer therefore calls for a greater variety of methods within the support offers. This could happen through possible collaborations with other municipalities to finance additional street workers.

The role of digital social work

Not only classic street working, but also digital approaches are becoming increasingly important. According to a recent study, young people aged 12 to 19 spend an average of over 3.5 hours a day on the Internet. Digital spaces support socialization, identity formation and the exchange of information. This is where digital street workers come in, reaching young people exactly where they spend their free time, be it on social media or in online forums. bpb.de emphasizes that this form of outreach social work has gained in importance since its first approaches in the early 2000s.

Classic street social work, which was launched in the 1970s to help young people with drug problems in particular, has evolved. Using the digital space is essential today because young people are very active here. The Digital Streetworkers are present on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Discord. Topics such as mental health, loneliness or bullying are often the focus deutschlandfunkkultur.de reported.

Challenges and future prospects

The challenges are great: young people are often confronted with extreme content online and suffer from digital bullying. A shocking figure from the 2023 JIM study shows that more than half of the young people surveyed have come into contact with offensive comments. Here, digital street workers offer their support by providing advice and psychosocial help and referring people to local offers such as therapy places. Deutschlandfunk culture emphasizes that digital street work reaches many young people, even if immediate success is not always visible.

In order to design future-oriented assistance offers, it is important to combine digital and traditional social work and to integrate these into university education in social work. Despite the resistance, it is clear that the need for digital social work is growing and innovative projects such as “Digital Streetwork” have already made over 7,000 contacts possible in Bavaria. In short: The social work of the future must be fit both online and offline - this is the only way to best meet the actual needs of young people.