Faris Shuqairat joined his local youth committee in 2016 and was, at first, reluctant to take part in anything. He is now the person other organisations hire to train their people.
The useful thing about Faris Shuqairat's story is that it has dates.
“He arrived wanting to serve, and reluctant to speak. The gap between those two things is where youth work actually happens.”
He joined the youth committee at Princess Basma Development Centre in Al-Wahadneh, Ajloun, in 2016. He was twenty, wanted to serve his community and develop himself, and, by his own account, was hesitant to take part in the initiatives once he arrived.
That hesitance is the most familiar fact in youth work and the least often recorded. Young people do not generally arrive at a centre and volunteer for the front. They arrive and stand at the back, and what happens in the following months decides everything.
What he found was a supportive environment and, crucially, training he could get his hands on: basic life skills, debate, and how to design an initiative rather than merely attend one. Later he became a trainer himself in the Generations of Peace programme.
Read that progression closely, because it is a specific machine and not a happy accident. Life skills make a young person functional. Debate makes him articulate: it is, in practice, the fastest cure for the fear of speaking that kept him at the back of the room. Initiative design makes him productive: he can now originate work rather than wait to be given it. Becoming a trainer makes him a multiplier.
Nine years on, Faris trains for civil-society organisations and coordinates programmes for American-funded projects in Jordan. He is, in the ordinary economic sense, employed because of what he learned as a volunteer, and Ajloun, a governorate that exports many of its young people, retains one who is producing more of them.
There is a question worth asking of every youth programme: what does it produce? Attendance is not an outcome. Certificates are not outcomes. The outcome here is a twenty-eight-year-old professional whose job is to make other young people capable, and who was, nine years ago, too hesitant to join in.
