Youth and community practitioner · Leith, Edinburgh
I'm Ryan, a youth and community practitioner with twenty years of work in Edinburgh's communities. At the Citadel in Leith, I bring people together through youth-led projects, intergenerational work and creative digital activities.
About
I'm Ryan McKay, a youth and community practitioner based in Leith. I've spent twenty years working in communities across Edinburgh, starting as a sessional youth worker in 2006 while I studied Community Education at Moray House.
Along the way I've done detached streetwork, homelessness outreach, mentoring, employability coaching and anti-sectarianism work. That last role, built around oral history and reminiscence, was where I first brought younger and older people together. Since 2015 I've been at the Citadel, leading intergenerational work through Old's Cool and New Spin, alongside school-based youth work and the development of Youth Spark and Youth Spark Digital.
Creativity is a big part of my practice. That might mean making a film, trying out a game, exploring local green spaces or bringing generations together to imagine the future of technology. The activity matters, but so do the conversations and relationships around it.
More and more, my work sits where communities, research and learning meet: co-authoring research, partnering with universities, and sharing what we learn through toolkits, writing and talks. I'm interested in how we make participation accessible, how people contribute their own knowledge, and how we share what we discover.
Young people exploring the issues that matter to them, shaping programmes and creating work to share.
Mutual learning and real relationships across generations, beyond simply sharing a room.
Games, film, AI and speculative technology as ways to express ideas and to question everyday life.
Connectivity, confidence and relationships, as well as devices.
Twenty years in community work
How I work
A four-stage way of working, shaped with young people through Youth Spark. Each stage starts from what people bring, not from an answer decided in advance.
Begin with what people notice, care about or want to understand. Gather experiences and questions before fixing the answer.
Young people investigated local parks and wellbeing for Dear Green Place.
Try ideas in a low-pressure way. Games, drama and experiments help people think together.
A playdough activity opened a day of youth-led practice with the Binks Hub.
Turn an idea into something people can shape and discuss. The product can change as the group learns.
Younger and older people built speculative tech prototypes at Hack Your Age.
Bring the work into conversation with others and make the learning useful beyond the group.
Youth Spark shared its learning through a co-designed toolkit and podcast.
Projects
A youth-led programme where young people explored their concerns and interests through creative, participatory and digital approaches, then shared their learning in a co-designed toolkit. It continues as Youth Spark Digital, which I lead, with digital issues and AI as its theme and young people shaping the programme within it.
Read about Youth SparkMy intergenerational work began with Old's Cool, supporting secondary-age young people to plan, run and evaluate activities with older people. It produced films, murals and a local-history Top Trumps. Today New Spin is a regular intergenerational café in Leith where younger and older people meet, build relationships and take part together.
Read "Going Old's Cool"Five days in which younger and older people used drama and prototyping to imagine new technologies and their social implications. The group created four dramas with accompanying prototypes and closed with a community showcase.
Read my reflectionYoung people investigated local green spaces and wellbeing using community activity and research tools, work that led to a finished mural. It taught us a lot about making community-based research accessible and engaging.
Read about the partnershipWriting and media
Notes from practice
A demanding, rewarding journey, and what it showed about making research accessible and engaging.
What changes when participants help create and interpret the evidence about their own lives.
A timeline of the moments, projects and people that changed how I work.
Contact
I'm always interested in conversations about youth participation, intergenerational practice, digital inclusion and partnerships between communities and universities.