My brother Malcolm Ball, who has died aged 61 of cancer, made a lasting contribution to the lives of young people in south-east London through his youth work in Lewisham.
In 2003 he co-founded, with his colleague Denis Hunter, the innovative Lewisham Young Mayor Project, encouraging young people in the borough to engage in local politics. Each year a young mayor is elected, and the chosen person has an annual budget to work with and a cabinet of volunteer advisers to implement the manifesto.
The idea has been much copied at home and abroad, and Malcolm and the young people involved helped a number of continental European towns to set up their own versions, including in Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic and Sweden.
Malcolm was born in Greenwich to Irish parents: Mary (nee Connerney), a school dinner lady, and Joseph, a bricklayer. Growing up on the Milton Court estate in Deptford, he went to St Thomas the Apostle school in Peckham and worked as a teenage volunteer in youth clubs and adventure playgrounds before deciding to take a sociology degree at Bedford College, University of London, in 1980.
After qualifying in a youth work and community development at Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University), he took up a post at the St Andrew’s Centre in Brockley and by the mid-1990s was a senior worker at the Lewisham Youth Service, where he helped to set up the Deptford Youth Forum, developed the borough-wide Youth Participation Project and occasionally lectured at Goldsmiths’ College (now Goldsmiths, University of London).
The Lewisham Young Mayor Project grew out of the Youth Participation Project and Malcolm was an adviser to it until his death. However, he always deliberately remained a frontline youth worker, being someone who shunned formalities, disliked professional preciousness and concentrated instead on removing barriers.
Over the years he was a key member of the Socialist Caucus of the Community and Youth Workers’ Union and was involved in the creation of a number of activist groups related to youth work, including the Leicester Community Education Workers support group, the Revolutionary Socialist Network and In Defence of Youth Work.
He was immensely proud of Lewisham’s anti-racist history. He loved to take visitors on his own guided tour of Deptford, starting at the town hall, where the Black People’s Day of Action march had gathered in 1981.
After almost 20 years together he and Amanda Brown, whom he had met when she worked in Deptford as a community legal adviser, became civil partners in 2021. He is survived by Amanda, his stepson, Emil, and his siblings, me and Joel.
