My friend and colleague Susan Atkins, who has died aged 86, was a highly respected youth worker in Sheffield who also played, over many decades, a national role in the validation of youth and community work training courses in higher education.
Sue was destined to be a youth worker. Born in Uxbridge, west London, she was the daughter of Kit and Paul Beaven, who ran a thriving open-access youth club that drew the attention of Jennie Lee, Labour’s minister for the arts, through its combination of informal social space with drama, music and art.
After leaving Bishopshalt school, Sue forged a reputation in the local amateur theatre group the Argosy Players, holding down an eclectic variety of daytime jobs to finance her thespian talent. In later years she would depict youth work as an unfolding drama, an improvised script, the authors of which were young people and youth workers as animated equals.
In 1966, she barely “survived” the one-year qualifying course at the new National College for Youth Leaders in Leicester. This experience of higher education that faltered on the edge of failure stayed with her for the rest of her remarkable career – and sometimes Sue expressed herself with a feigned anti-intellectualism.
In 1967, she accepted what was intended to be a temporary post in Sheffield as a community-based youth worker with immigrants. She was never to leave, and worked in tandem with Mike Atkins, soon to be the city’s race adviser, whom she married in 1969. Her pioneering work with the Afro-Caribbean community created a responsive youth service within which young people prospered, often becoming education and welfare practitioners in their own right.
She was a dynamic presence within the Community and Youth Workers’ Union (now part of Unite the Union), embracing a caucusing structure that amplified the voices of women, and black, gay and part-time workers. Serving as president of the union in the mid-1980s, she was a leading negotiator for improved wages and conditions.
After her retirement in 1998, Sue threw herself into the development of YASY (the Youth Association South Yorkshire), and, from 2009, she was energised by the In Defence of Youth Work campaign. She identified passionately with its vision of youth work as “volatile and voluntary, creative and collective – an association and conversation without guarantees”. Dubbing herself teasingly as “a woolly Marxist optimist”, she was a socialist-feminist and supported Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party.
In the last of 20 annual reports to her beloved YASY, she ended: “For me, Youth Work has always sought to enable and facilitate young people to test, explore and flourish, to discover their hopes and dreams and find their focus and direction.” The day before she died Sue was in a meeting called to design a training programme for volunteers. Throughout, she was devoted to her life’s work.
Sue is survived by Mike, a stepdaughter, Kiya, and grandson, Isaiah, and her brother, Peter.
