Hello and welcome to the BCU alumni podcast, I'm Bethan and in each episode, we welcome a different member of the BCU alumni community back onto campus to find out what they've been up to since they graduated.
Today we're joined by Craig Pinkney. Craig is a criminologist, urban youth specialist and Chief Executive of Solve the Center for Youth Violence and Conflict. At BCU Craig studied for an MA in criminology, a postgraduate certificate in research and he is currently completing a PhD in social sciences.
Craig has over 18 years of experience as an outreach worker, transformational speaker, international gang exit strategist, training facilitator, mediator, mentor and filmmaker. He works across the UK with challenging young people, potentially high-risk offenders, victims of gang violence and youth who are deemed most hard to reach.
In 2021 Craig launched the Solve Online Learning Centre, which is an online learning platform that provides remote professional development to professionals within education, criminal justice, social care, children's services, youth community and families. Craig has also co-founded Solve Housing which is a company that establishes residential children's homes based here in the West Midlands.
Craig has also authored and co-authored several reports and peer-reviewed academic publications, his research interests include urban street gangs, youth violence, social media and street violence, trauma and masculinity.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing Craig's career and how he's bridged the gap between academia and disadvantaged young people. Craig thanks so much for coming onto the podcast today.
Thanks for having me.
So you're about a halfway through your PhD here at BCU now.
Plodding through, getting through yeah.
But you have been passionate about working with young people for almost 20 years now, so how and where did your interest in tackling youth violence come from?
Oh it's a hard one I don't think it's a weird, so I was working with young people for a long period of time and I think it may have been 2000 and 8 or 7 when I kind of acknowledged that a lot of the young people that were from the community that I was living in, was getting either caught up in situations where sadly their lives were taken, or they were perpetrators of violence, and I was just like "why?". And then when I was working for Birmingham City Council and I was a senior youth worker at a local youth centre, you know all of those amazing little human beings that used to come in; funny, gifted, talented, full of joy and then I recognised, within a couple of years, a lot of them then ended up into the same thing that I was worried and concerned about. And I guess I was interested in why is that happening, you know we've given all of these young people opportunities we enable them to have you know recreational activities, you know they've got educators, they've got people that can connect with them that are on the ground, why are they still going out and doing the things that we read in the newspapers every single day? And I guess that's what inspired me then to come to BCU and do a Master's degree in Criminology.
So you've achieved so much in your career so far then but what is it that drives you to do what you do?
My why is a question that I always ask myself from time to time, and I think my why changes. In the beginning, it was I was sick and tired of going to funerals, I've buried quite a lot of young people sadly to serious violence, and what used to frustrate me is when a mother would come to me and say "you know what Craig can you help me?" and with all those skills and the tools that I have I knew that in that moment I couldn't, other than hold them, so I wanted to speak to that and I said I wanted to work hard in order to stop that from happening. Then I think my why changed over the years and partly the reason why I decided to do a PhD is because now it's about how do I create a standard? So my PhD really and hopefully will set a standard across the West Midlands that for those that want to work with disadvantaged children and young people, young people that are on the periphery young people that are actively involved in the issues that we're worried and concerned about, that for every practitioner that seeks to work with those young people they understand the standard of how to work. Because I argue in my research that post 2012 the standard has dropped, and you don't need a national qualification anymore to work with children and young people, even though there are people that do study to get qualifications, however individuals that are on the front line and with just lived the experience and lived experience alone is not enough and what I'm calling for it needs to be a standard and maybe not a national standard but definitely for the West Midlands. And I think quite selfishly that we need a regional standard in order to work with children and young people that are affected by anti social behaviour, criminal exploitation, sexual exploitation, radicalisation, extremism, street gangs a whole lot, we need a standard.
So can you talk me through what Solve offers professionals then, and also I guess what inspired you to set it up in the first place?
So the inspiration actually came from my mentor, or a number of mentors, one of them Dr Martin Glynn who's also based here at BCU um Dr Sangeeta Soni who's now also based here, and she was my line manager in my previous role at University College Birmingham, right, and my other Mentor Raymond Douglas who's the national lead for an organisation around serious youth violence. And I guess when I was at the university one of the things that used to frustrate me was I always asked to teach the same subject over and over again every semester. And it was a gift and a curse, because whilst I felt like I could teach more than gangs and serious youth violence, I wanted to teach things around sociology I loved talking about things like race, class and politics and gender inequality, I love talking about you know the society as a whole, I love talking about communication and how you can work with different human beings, but because my students really loved me teaching this particular subject, that's what I mean by it was a gift and a curse. So my line manager would always say that "I know that you want to do more but there's a whole batch of students here that are really interested in this particular work that you do" and I guess when I wanted to, I guess leave the institution, sitting down and speaking to my mentors they got me down and kind of sat with me and said "Craig, what exactly do you do?" and I was thinking "what do I do?" I'm good at solving problems and that's where the kind of emphasis of solve kind of came from. And I guess the organisation started with me thinking that I wanted to develop professional practice, which is very much what I did at the University anyway, developing professionals, or call them students, but in my line of work they're professionals anyway, so they can be better to respond to the issues that we're concerned with within the country. And then it developed from working with professionals to having an opportunity with the police and crime commission and a violence reduction unit, and that was very much around how do we support the workers on the ground to be able to respond to these particular issues. And then Covid-19 came in yeah and that was probably one of the scariest times because I've just left my big job, mum and dad are like what the hell are you doing and I remember the morning where I was getting emails was like cancelled, cancelled we have to reschedule, reschedule and my heart stopped. and I got a call from Chelsea Football Club yeah and they contacted me and said following the kind of the ripple effect of the George Floyd case that was happening at that particular time, part of their agenda is that they want to focus on race and anti-racism within football and they've looked online and have seen that I've done stuff like that before, would I be willing to have a conversation with them. I did, in a nutshell I went to Chelsea Football Club to deliver some seminars and some workshops around understanding racism and youth violence and they was just like they were sold. Then they said would you be willing to work with us across the whole Academy from the under 21s all the way down to the little ones and I was just like yeah. So after Chelsea Football Club published what I was doing on their website I got an email from someone from the Premier League and they said what's this stuff that you're doing at Chelsea would you be willing to do the same thing in all of the football clubs. Wow. And I was like yeah, so I've gone from leaving the university to working with the police and crime commission in the West Midlands to somebody seeing something I was doing online, to now I'm working across the Premier League. Now I don't like football so it was interesting that I'm working in an environment of football fanatics but for me I treated them like human beings, I didn't put them on a pedestal and then following from that I then got a unique opportunity to work with Chelsea's Football Club's first team, and I must say again I think that's what my kind of gem was at that time was to be able to you know just communicate with individuals without looking at them in terms of their labels. And I think from that particular opportunity what then just happened is I just felt like Solve as an entity just just developed. Everybody wanted me to train their teams, the local authorities in Norfolk wanted me to train them, local authorities in Manchester wanted me to train them and then Birmingham followed suit, even though I'm from Birmingham he says "ooh can you train and the local authority here as well" so then ended up training the whole of Birmingham youth offending service, Birmingham's Children's Trust and then supporting the Children's Trust in their kind of charity arm Be Friends, and I'm just meeting loads and loads and loads of people and I kind of think to myself, going back to your earlier question, I've been doing this work for 18 years now and I feel like I'm the fruits that I'm seeing of all of the graft that I put in it makes sense, you know this is what I wanted and this is where we've got. And then that kind of merged into another opportunity where number one I couldn't be everywhere at once and that was the reason why I thought let me create an online platform with, not just me, but the experts that I love you know Dr Lizzie Fitzmaurice and Dr Martin Glynn and you know um Liz Pemberton and some of the people that I'm I really love and passionate about their work and how can I put them all in a platform where people have that opportunity to learn. And then from that then I had another opportunity to open up a children's home yeah and that is probably my main focus of the last 12 months. So the Premier League stuff that I'm doing as well working with a number of councils and violence reduction partnerships the children's home is something that I'm really really proud of, and it all just kind of makes sense around creating that standard.
I was going to ask actually about Solve Housing then, so how is it helping children across our region then?
It's it's meeting the need yeah, if we look nationally unfortunately social care is is is struggling you know children that need to be placed in homes, there's a lot of difficulty placing them in the homes for a number of factors, you know one of the key things is around children being matched in appropriate homes, so it's hard you can't have two children well not to say you can't, but it's very difficult to have children that may have similar risks in the same space together. So you've got may have one child low level, I don't know CCE, and you've got another child that's high-risk CC for example, having both of them in the home may not be great because the older one that's high-risk may be influencing the younger one to be involved in those things. And then also you gotta then apply the biases and the systemic issues you know race also plays an interesting role and I guess as a black leader of an organisation one of the things that we said was we want to be able to cater to those needs of black and asian young kids, because statistically as you know those young people are also just not being looked at or overlooked. In these particular scenarios we look at disparities and the figures just tell one side of the story but when you actually see in person, it's actually really sad and I'm talking about something as simple as you know a child may come from a particular background and it may say medium risk CCE and people are just writing those kids off and we're welcoming those kids in. And guess what, we find out what's on the paper is not what we meet in terms of those human beings. So then that means there's so many young people in our community that can get love, that can get the attention, that can get the right support and has just been overlooked based on a label that actually sometimes isn't that accurate. And then that goes back to my earlier point around the standard because people just clearly don't know what they're doing they're working in these environments. And I think part of it is to do with the curriculum as well, I don't think the curriculum in universities are equipping students to go out and deal with issues in a contextual way. So for example you know a lot of social workers that I come into contact with, they do loads of stuff around safeguarding and ensuring safety and all of that risk assessment and all of that type of stuff, but is it done in a contextual way? Meaning that when individuals go into the community are they cultural competent, are they cultural responsive? And if they're not you're not going to be fit for purpose and I think where I think that the Solve entities kind of come together and merge is because it's meeting the same need but in a different way. Yeah so I want to create a standard in terms of the Learning and Development I want to raise the awareness of issues in communities for people to be mobilised for them to support their communities around some of those issues. I want young people not just to be aware, but to be resilient, but also to have the tools and the strategies to be able to respond, and then for those individuals that don't have access to me all of the time they can access me through social media platforms and then the third aspect in terms of the children and young people that oftentimes get overlooked, by opening our doors to have those children and young people there. And this is really nice because we just had Ofsted in yeah over the last couple of weeks and we just got a Good rating, and I think that's quite excellent and a testament of the hard work that our team have amazingly done. And we're now in the process of opening our second children's home.
So alongside your youth work then you've also obviously been heavily involved in academia for around 15 years then, so how have you managed to combine the two and been able to also use your experiences in both aspects?
It's I've always said I've been in a very unique space, in that unique space in the sense that I started as a frontline practitioner and working in an environment but at centres that were nationally known, where people didn't want to work. Yeah in my first youth centre I remember seeing this ad you know to be a senior youth worker and I used to see it every single month, like I'm talking about my final year of University, and thinking "is there nobody that's applying for this job?" yeah and it wasn't until I arrived there and then I found out about a number of incidents where murders and stuff had happened outside of the building, it was just a massive fear in the community about going to this building. So I felt like that was my rights of passage being able to work with individuals in that environment, them allowing me to come in, be amongst them, learn them. And it was interesting because a lot of those individuals that were at the centre were the little brothers and cousins from people that I went to school with, so coming back to my community after leaving Demontfort University and then coming back to Birmingham to kind of give my love and my wealth of knowledge, really kind of developed that foundation, I would say, in order for me to kind of build and develop. And so the academic side to things is really about the application of the things that I was learning and what does that mean? So I always meet individuals that are amazing practitioners or I mean amazing academics I've never met many people that have had the frontline experience and then become academics I mean I know a few, as I said, one of my mentors Dr Martin Glynn and a few others that I'm inspired by around the nation, but there's a lot of people that do youth work. But I think the type of youth work that I was doing was I want to not say unique but there's not many people that work with frontline gang members in the city and then also become an academic yeah and then use the same individuals to be a part of their PhD study. That requires a lot of trust that requires those individuals understanding you and also trusting that the fact that you're not gonna throw them under the bus and use them as an opportunity to get to where I need to get to. And I think that's what's happened a lot of times in academia people have utilised people for the reasons of research, which makes perfect sense, but I immerse myself in my community, I'm from the community, the people are my people. So oftentimes when I look at the young people that I used to work with I see them as brothers and sisters, I don't see them as participants as part of a study and that real insider perspective that I talk about in kind of the writings that I talk about, is what gives me the edge. I think that's my unique selling point that I've got the frontline experiences of working with those in a city that people are fully aware of "how did Craig work with those individuals?" and now I'm in an academic space talking about it and I take that right back to going to the schools within Birmingham amongst different types of individuals, and then my first big job was in the centre that nobody wanted to work with all of these so-called hard to reach so-called feared young people were all there and were all laughing and joking and happy to see people at that particular time. Yeah. And yeah that that that's how I can just explain it, and I just sit in that middle how do I bring both entities together to create new insights, new thoughts, new ideas of ways in which we can reduce some of the issues that are taking place in our communities.
I'm very much about reduction now when you asked me earlier about my motivation it used to be about stopping, but I realised that if I can't change world poverty, if I can't stop you know the lack of resources and the political sphere that's shaping the way in which, you know frames communities to be a particular type of way, if I can't stop some of the things that are happening in terms of organised criminality, and where drugs are coming into the country, and the way guns are manufactured and have been brought into the country, yeah I might not be able to stop that but I can reduce it. So my positionality's changed, and I talk a lot in my work about positionality because when you understand your positionality that then links to your why, and that's why I say now it's about how do I create a standard. So that standard would be is that if you want to work with children and young people you have to go through some academic rigour. Whilst we want you to be you know on the front line, and you understand the community, you have the grassroots knowledge, you have all of that but you have to have that academic rigour where you then have a standard. So you're thinking about the true application of knowledge as it relates to the issues and the things that you're trying to deal with on a day to day.
So what is it that you think, well I guess more what more do you think, needs to be done then to help young people especially those caught up in gangs?
I think the question's limited because gangs are only a small population within our community. I prefer to talk more about youth vulnerability. Why? Because I know more young people in the West Midlands now that have access to knives, I know more young people in the West Midlands now that have access to firearms and more young people in the West Midlands that are talking to groups that may be involved in extremism of all forms, as opposed to young people that may be involved in those things. Yeah and I think part of the problem in the West Midlands is that we're focusing solely on gangs and ignoring all the other young people. So the question for me more so, is what can we do to help children and young people within the West Midlands to deter them away from those issues that we're worried and concerned about? So we need better finance, you know there needs to be a massive investment in terms of young people. We know post-2012 there's been cuts in services left right and centre. But I know that even if there was an investment to let's say open up youth centres all over the place, we've still gotta deal with a ripple effect of the recession from 2010 to 12, then we've got to deal with the ripple effect of what's happened after that point then we've got to deal with the ripple effect of Covid-19. Yeah. So now we have to talk about investment in mental health and supporting children and young people. It's then also about ensuring that young people have different opportunities, and not just the same traditional you know somebody comes in and gives you a motivational talk, we've been doing that for years now. What young people need to know is how? We're talking about the growth of technology, and we're talking about the influencer culture, and we're talking about entrepreneurship and ways in which people are making money. Young people are talking about cryptocurrency, they're talking about stocks and shares, they're playing games on PlayStation and Xbox and they're making money. We need to be in tune with that, we need to be in tune with youth culture, we need to be in tune with how young people see the world, and young people are the answer. I think we make this sometimes too complex, young people are the answer and we don't listen enough to what they're saying. And what they're saying is they want a piece of the pie too, what they're saying is we also want to have an opportunity too. So if we're only creating opportunities for specific groups of individuals, there's always going to be young people unfortunately on the wayside and I think that's what it's going to take. And I think the last part is maybe because we're looking at it national, ideally we want a national change and we need a paradigm shift. I think we should start regionally first and that's why my phd's selfish and only focuses on the West Midlands.
Did you ever expect your career to go in this direction?
My grandparents always say that they prayed for this, I don't know what that means.
I don't know what that means, so I think that I'm living testament to all the people I've lost in my family.
What advice would you give to those who are, you know, really inspired by who you are and what you do and they're you know they're keen to follow in your footsteps?
Learn, read, learn, read, get a mentor, learn, read and get in the deep end and start swimming.
You've been selected as one of our Barrier Breakers at this year's Alumni Festival so what does that mean to you?
I've just been someone that's been focused on the journey and I feel like I'm a walking role mode. I come from a community where we were told you're not going to make it, we were told we're gonna go jail, we were told you're going to end up dead if we don't change the ways in which we think and we believe. When I was never, I was never none of those things. But I wanted to demonstrate to my community that we can come from the ends, we can come from Hockley, Winson Green yeah and we can do amazing things. And that was partly the reason why I did a PhD. You know when I said earlier on that I did my masters was for that reason, but the reason why I did my PhD is because I wanted to change, I wanted to show young people that come from that inner city community that you can do it. So everything that I do I try to break barriers, everything that I do I try to show young people that you know you don't have to be a person in the suit you know to be this intellectual thing, so when I show up in my tracksuit at the University when I show up in my tracksuit you know at a prison, when I show up in my tracksuit to just meet young people I'm smashing stereotypes at the same time. Because we're not supposed to be here but we are now.
Final question then if you could go back to your very first day here at BCU what is the one piece of advice that you would give yourself?
Speak to student advice. I didn't realise I was neurodiverse and I was dyslexic. So I followed a lot of my peers because I thought that buying post it notes and buying like charts and paper, and whilst we're in lectures I was doing what they was doing. But then when I would go back to my room I didn't understand my own writing, it wasn't making any sense. So I was failing my first few assignments because I thought I was stupid, right I'm thinking "I'm at University but how can I not read my own my own writing?" and I just learned that I was, I just had specific needs around my my learning needs. And that would be my only advice you know don't take that for granted, you know you got the whole Departments of amazing human beings that just want to help you, that don't want you to fail. You know so when you're thinking about oh I want to quickly fly to Costa or Starbucks, or go to Nando's with the crew to have something to eat or have lunch, to spend 20 minutes with somebody and just try and learn your learning style and how you process information and the second you crack that code you're doing. That's the best advice I would give to somebody or to myself on the first day, I would have said go straight to that building an department and get them to do an assessment.
Craig, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today, honestly it's been so lovely to speak to you and hopefully we'll see you again very soon.
Thank you.
