Just over a year ago, I had a breakdown.

There were a number of reasons for it, and it would be far too simplistic to reduce the whole experience to one thing. But one significant part of it was isolation.

Youth work can be an oddly lonely calling. That sounds strange, because very little about youth work looks lonely from the outside. Our weeks are filled with young people, volunteers, church leaders, parents, teachers and other professionals. We run groups and events, visit schools, sit in meetings, and spend a great deal of our working lives surrounded by people. Yet behind all of that, many youth workers actually work quite alone.

You plan sessions on your own. You sit at a desk on your own. You make difficult decisions on your own. You carry stories and situations that are sometimes enormously heavy, and there aren’t always many people around who really understand what carrying them feels like.

Even when you are part of a supportive church or organisation, there is something different about having other youth workers alongside you who understand the particular joys and pressures of the job.

Since my return to full-time work, I’ve become increasingly conscious that my experience wasn’t unusual. I keep meeting youth workers who, in different ways and in very different contexts, describe the same problem. They love young people. They believe deeply in what they’re doing. They may even be surrounded by supportive people. But the actual day-to-day experience of doing youth ministry can still be surprisingly isolated.

So we’ve been thinking about whether we can do something practical about that.

A new workplace for youth workers

At Llandudno Youth for Christ, we have an upstairs room at The Garage which we are turning into a new office and resource space for a few local Christian youth workers. We’re putting some serious investment into making it a genuinely excellent place to work, with proper desks and workstations, a conference table, a growing library of youth ministry and theological resources, equipment, printing facilities, and space for planning, meetings and creative work.

But really, the room isn’t the point.

The hope is that somebody who would otherwise spend Wednesday afternoon preparing a youth group alone at home can come and work alongside two or three other people doing the same sort of thing. Someone can make a coffee, open their laptop and get on with their work, but there are other people in the room when they need to talk something through.

Ideas can be shared without organising a formal meeting, someone can mention a problem they are facing and discover that another youth worker has dealt with something similar, resources can be borrowed rather than bought again, and churches can discover that they are separately trying to solve the same problem, and might be better off solving it together.

Over time, we hope that this sort of proximity will create something much more valuable than a shared office. We hope it creates community, mutual support and joined-up thinking about youth ministry across our area.

And we want to give it away.

(Mock up of the design)

Co-working community for youth mission

We aren’t creating a co-working space to rent out to churches, and we absolutely aren’t interested in using it as a way of bringing everybody’s youth ministry under the Youth for Christ banner! We simply have a space that we can offer, and we want to be generous with it.

So local Christian youth workers who share our vision for seeing more young people come to know Jesus will be able to use the space, whether they work for Youth for Christ, for a local church, or for another Christian organisation.

There is something important to us in that. We want to see youth ministry flourish across Llandudno and the surrounding area, not simply our own projects. If a youth worker in another church is better supported and stays in ministry longer, we all benefit. If two churches begin working together because their youth workers happened to spend an afternoon around the same table, we all benefit. If somebody discovers a resource they would never otherwise have found, or gets encouragement on a particularly difficult week, or simply feels a little less alone in what they are doing, then the room will be doing what we built it to do.

Most importantly, if healthier, better-supported, and better-connected youth workers help more young people encounter Jesus, then that is worth investing in.

(current state of the room)

Could your church help us be generous to other local churches?

We’ve already committed £2,000 to making this vision a reality. That’s enough for us to do the basics; decorate the room, furnish it and begin turning it into a genuinely useful office and resource space.

But we’d love to do it properly!

Ideally, we’d like to bring in an electrician to add more sockets so the room works well as a shared office, replace the existing lighting with something better suited to a working environment, and provide us with the appropriate electrical safety certification. Those aren’t particularly exciting things to fund, but they would make a significant difference to the quality and usefulness of the space.

There is also an ongoing cost. More people working from The Garage means increased use of printing, internet, refreshments, and other resources. We expect opening up the building in this way to increase our monthly outgoings.

That’s why we’d love to invite local churches to help us make that generosity possible.

If this is something you think your church could get behind?

Would you share this post and the accompanying video with your church leaders? Perhaps you could have a conversation together about whether your church could become a regular giving partner of Llandudno Youth for Christ, supporting our work each month, and helping us continue to provide things like this for the wider church.

Of course, one-off gifts towards creating the space would be enormously appreciated, but regular giving gives us the confidence to be generous for the long term; not simply building a great room, but keeping it available, resourced, and free for those who need it.

Although we’re excited about the office itself, we’re much more excited about what might grow out of it. We want this to be something Llandudno Youth for Christ can gift to the local church as a place to work, certainly, but also a place to share ideas, resources, encouragement and life.

My own experience has taught me how damaging isolation in youth ministry can become. I can’t make sure that another youth worker never goes through what I went through, and a shared office certainly isn’t the answer to every pressure that comes with this work.

But perhaps we can make it a little harder for people to end up carrying it all alone.

And that’s a room worth building.