AFTER 23 years of working in the community sector, Northern Ireland Youth Forum (NIYF) Director Chris Quinn is a familiar face to many in wider North Belfast and beyond.
The Glengormley man has played, and continues to play, a vital role as a community activist through his work at NIYF and through his voluntary work, which includes coaching youth teams at Naomh Éanna GAC.
As Director of the Youth Forum he oversees a wide range of youth empowerment initiatives, including non-formal education opportunities which help young people change their own lives and communities.
Set up in 1979, the NIYF now works with over 10,000 people, including young people who are unemployed, homeless or under paramilitary threat, as well as those who suffer from mental ill health and addiction problems.
In a nutshell, NIYF works to ensure that our society’s most marginalised are not left behind.
Chris has headed the organisation for 10 years and has an obvious passion for social justice, something that he largely credits to his time at the Star Neighbourhood Centre in the New Lodge.
After leaving St Malachy’s College, Chris counts himself lucky to have been given a voluntary role at the Star.
“I landed on my feet with the Star,” he said.
“I volunteered there for about four years before getting a paid role. I worked there for a further two years under the stewardship of Jim Deery, who I owe a lot to. Jim really gave me a foot up when I needed it. I cut my teeth in the back streets of the New Lodge learning about social justice, community development and participative democracy.
“I always knew I wanted to work with young people – it’s my passion. In St Malachy’s I spent as many free periods as I could get playing football as opposed to studying – I wanted to do teaching at that time, but I wasn’t really interested in the A-Levels I was doing.
“There was always that draw to work with people, young people in particular. My mummy was always heavily involved in the community and volunteering, so I also have that family background.”
After six years at the Star, Chris went on to become a Senior Development Officer at the Bytes Project before taking up a post as the Children and Young People’s Coordinator with Belfast City Council, where he helped set up a city youth forum and Belfast’s first skate park.
Remarkably, he took up the Director’s role at NIYF just a few years later when he was just 30 years old. It presented a massive new challenge, which Chris insists he was well prepared to meet, despite his young age.
“It was definitely in my DNA,” he said.
“It’s about building the capacity of young people to affect positive change.
“We always talk about young people being part of the solution as opposed to being the problem, and again I have to pay credit to Jim Deery, he was the one who schooled me in that chain of thought.
“All of those people in the Star really heavily influenced my thinking. All of my jobs since leaving school, whether it was in voluntary or paid capacity, had that underbelly. It’s about people making positive change for themselves.
“When the job in the Youth Forum came up it was like a dream job, it was allowing me to do something that I had been practising for years, but only on a regional basis.
“The role here is very strategic. You’re linked into government, you’re linked into the EU, we’re presenting to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, so we’re doing all of this amazing work internationally as well as locally.
“We are working with young people who are on the margins, such as homeless young people, and seeing those young people building their own capacity to affect change in their own lives and communities is amazing.”
He continued: “Some days I feel like I should come in with a firefighter’s hat, because you spend an awful lot of time fighting fires and managing mini crises.
“A big part of the job is strategising, lobbying and campaigning. I often talk about speaking truth to power, so it’s about bringing the voice of young people to those in a position of power. Sometimes that’s uncomfortable for those in positions of power, because you’re banging down doors to try to affect change for the marginalised people in society. Every day is a battle. You’re fighting a fight for people who are getting the rough end of the stick.”
In an ever-changing world, the problems faced by young people have become increasingly complex, and Chris says that many of them are challenges faced by young people the world over. However, he believes that legacy of our recent conflict makes many of our own young people’s challenges unique.
“Whether you’re in Belfast, Paris or Sydney, there are massive problems around mental health, drugs, poverty, exclusion and all of these things you can apply to any area,” he said.
“The big thing here is the legacy of the past – it’s the lens that magnifies all of these problems. I would relate a lot of the reasons our high suicide rates and mental ill-health to the conflict and the legacy of the past. There is a lot we still don’t know; we talk about transgenerational trauma. You just need to look out the window and you can see people living with these issues and a lot of it is linked to the conflict. If we don’t deal with legacy and we don’t deal with the conflict then that’s not going to go away.”
Despite the magnitude of the task ahead, Chris and the NIYF are relentless in their pursuit of a better society. After serving that eye-opening apprenticeship he now heads one of the largest providers of non-formal education in the country. There is undoubtedly a lesson to be learned from his experience.
“I know it’s a cliché, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he said.
“Every time you are faced with a challenge it can be a valuable lesson. Again, another cliché, sometimes you learn more in failure than in success. I’m a great believer in ‘Mól an óige agus tiocfaidh sí – praise the youth and they shall prosper’.
“In my work life and in my voluntary work teaching kids in sport I try to teach them about work ethic. I try to teach them that hard work beats talent and that talent doesn’t work hard.
“The education system as it is set up is designed for maybe 17 per cent of high achievers, so in my opinion it is failing so many young people. Non-formal education, for us, is about finding that passion. For us it’s about encouraging young people to find the thing that lights the fire in their belly.”