Why bring the municipal youth counselling online?

Faster and better help Anni Marquard, initiator and Head of Centre at Centre for Digital Youth Care, explains that the single most important thing about their collaboration is the fact that shortcuts are created for the counsellors in each of their municipality. Hereby, we ensure that children and young people who need extra help, receive more accurate help, faster:

“It is much easier and quicker to refer someone to a municipality who collaborates with Cyberhus.dk and thus, ensure that they receive proper help,” says Anni Marquard.

Young people, from municipalities across Denmark, may write in and receive counselling on Cyberhus.dk. In some cases, someone may need extra help, and in such instances it is a great advantage if a counsellor is able to refer that person directly to a municipal chat counselling where they are able to chat to a counsellor from their own municipality. Local municipal counsellors are better equipped to help because they know which specific services and opportunities are available in someone’s municipality.

Online counselling must establish contact with young people

Ane Justensen, SSP-consultant (interdisciplinary collaboration between schools, social authorities, and police) with Odder municipality explains that this municipality finds it difficult to get young people to use their open, anonymous counselling in its present form; despite the fact that they assess this is a target group which would actually like to use anonymous counselling. So, Ane Justensen hopes that by bringing their chat counselling online, they will have more young people use their open, anonymous chat counselling:

“Young people do not enter our open, anonymous counselling. They do not come here, and knock on the door and share with us if they feel bad. It is my hope that they will feel more inclined to seek help if they are able to do so online, says Ane Justensen.

The portal of the municipalities with whom we collaborate, will be located on Cyberhus.dk which is already a well-established and popular online counselling platform, and this increases the chances that a young person realises that a local online counselling exists. Having a total of five municipalities online on Cyberhus.dk, is another great advantage according to Ane Justensen:

“Also, it is a great advantage to become part of a municipal network, hosting a great deal of knowledge, because things have already been implemented in other municipalities. A lot of knowledge sharing takes place which is of great value to us,” says Ane Justensen.

Prevention and skills upgrading

The municipality of Halsnæs would like to do prevention and skills upgrading which is a few of the reasons why they have entered their municipal collaboration with Cyberhus.dk:

“We very much try to focus on prevention, and generally it is a great priority to us to qualify our employees, so that they have the tools needed to handle tasks in demand. Besides, we know that young people from the municipality of Halsnæs do use Cyberhus.dk’s chat counselling, so it makes sense indeed that we, too, bring our counselling online on Cyberhus.dk,” says Martin Bannow, SSP-coordinator with the municipality of Halsnæs.

The municipalities of both Odder and Halsnæs have participated in a start-up training course, being introduced to the concept of providing online counselling, and they will be online on Cyberhus.dk from 1 December.

Would you like to become part of our collaboration?

If you and your municipality would like to become part of our collaboration, become more visible to your local young people, and develop Denmark’s youth counselling, please contact Anni Marquard @ anni@cfdp.dk, or tel.: + 50 50 24 13.   This project is supported by: ]]>