Thinking about practical work

During my thought process about creating work in the community, i think it's important to remember something that came up in today's lecture. Some subject matter needs to be thought about carefully before it can be tackled. I think it would be incredibly naive of me to approach a group of, say, homeless people, and pretend i know what it's like to be homeless, when i clearly don't. In saying this however, it doesn't mean that i have to avoid working with certain groups, as coming from quite a privileged background, i wouldn't be able to work with quite a few groups, but instead i would need to think about my approach.
At the moment i am thinking about working with young offenders, or possibly young sufferers of abuse, or violence. As i haven't been in either of the situations, i cannot go into this group and lecture them on what it's like to be a young offender, instead maybe we could create work from their experiences and ideas in order to educate or inform other children their age?
It's something to think about in the process of creating work...