The COVID-19 pandemic created a range of challenges for young people. ARK facilitated a policy roundtable with youth work practitioners, policy makers and youth work professionals from the north and south of Ireland to explore the pandemic from a youth service perspective.

The discussion highlighted the significant potential to build on the already positive north south co-operation between youth services, including the North South Education and Training Standards Committee for Youth Work (NSETS), as well as practice development and training for qualified and volunteer youth workers. However, the pandemic has revealed urgent and emerging issues for training in both jurisdictions, for example, practitioner skills gap in ICT; youth mental health; the area of worker self-care; and reflective practice.

Reclaiming youth work: A return to the founding principles of youth work during the COVID-19 pandemic by Mark Hammond and Clare Harvey is a policy brief associated with the round table.

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The Dementia in the Minds of Characters and Readers project investigates how the language of fiction represents the minds of characters with dementia.

On 27 March, Jane Lugea (Principal Investigator of the project) gave an interactive talk exploring how dementia is represented in fictional language, how readers respond to it, and why. The event was part of the Imagine: The Belfast Festival of Ideas and Politics, and a video of the event is now available.

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The Gender Budgeting in Northern Ireland project is examining the potential for gender budgeting in Northern Ireland to enhance equality analysis and equality outcomes. The research team held a webinar on 25 February to profile some of the key findings from the research to date, and a video of the event is available.

Two working papers on the project have been published:

• Gender Budgeting: What does the Literature Tell us? Lessons for Northern Ireland
• A Case Study of Apprenticeships in Northern Ireland

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The CAIN Associate Programme aims to showcase how resources such as CAIN play a role in academic research and in the work of policy makers and practitioners.

We are delighted that four Associates will be working with CAIN this year: David Huddleston (PRONI), Professor Robert Savage (Boston College), Roberta Bacic (Conflict Textiles) and Dr Eamon Phoenix.

Full details about the scheme and the Associates are available on the CAIN website.

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The first event in the CAIN Associate Programme series was held on 22 April. PRONI and CAIN: Using Conflict Archives was presented by David Huddleston (Head of Records Management, Cataloguing and Access at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). In this webinar, David outlined the history and role of PRONI, followed by a discussion about the PRONI RECORDS on CAIN section, which highlighted some key official records from the 1960s to 1990s.

The video and powerpoint slides from the event are available online.

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ARK is Northern Ireland's social policy hub. Established in 2000 by researchers at Queen's University Belfast and Ulster University, its primary goal is to increase the accessibility and use of academic data and research. Most of our dissemination is via our website at www.ark.ac.uk, which is divided into five main areas:

• Surveys
• Projects
• Resources
• Publications
• Events

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