TPP Conference

A Youth Service Conference for Youth Work Practitioners

Background and Purpose

The ENGAGE programme, funded through the Executive Programme on Paramilitarism and Organised Crime (EPPOC) and delivered across statutory and voluntary youth services, concludes in March 2025. ENGAGE was developed as a targeted youth work response to violence, criminal exploitation, coercive control and paramilitary influence affecting children and young people in specific communities.

ENGAGE: INSIGHTS provides space to reflect on the programme’s journey, share learning from delivery and evaluation, and distil key practice understandings that can inform youth work in similarly complex contexts. The focus is on meaning—on what ENGAGE has taught us—rather than on continuation or expansion.

This conference brings together practitioners, delivery partners, policy colleagues and strategic stakeholders to examine, with care and honesty, the insights that have emerged from this work.

Conference Aim

To capture, share and make sense of learning from ENGAGE in order to strengthen understanding of targeted, relational youth work responses to violence, exploitation and paramilitary harm.

Conference Objectives

1. Reflect on the ENGAGE journey and the case for change
   The social and ecological context, and the rationale for a targeted youth work response.
2. Share evidence‑informed learning
   From delivery and evaluation, including the importance of focus, consistency and relational depth, and the articulation of ENGAGE+ as a tertiary‑level response.
3. Show how the ENGAGE approach appears in practice
   Across mentoring, pathways, gender‑responsive work, harm reduction and place‑based delivery.
4. Support shared understanding across the youth work sector
   Recognising what is transferable and what requires contextual adaptation.
5. Contribute to sector knowledge and reflective practice
   Without implying continuity or future programme commitments.