WHAT IS THE PROBLEM YOU ARE WORKING TO SOLVE?
Most young people are excluded from decision making, especially where this relates to the design and delivery of public services. Those opportunities that do exist tend to be via outmoded 20th century representative and supposedly ‘democratic’ structures which are a turnoff for the majority and engage only the elite - what we at Changemakers call ‘professional young people’. We want to provide meaningful opportunities for the vast majority of ‘ordinary’ young people and, in particular, young social entrepreneurs, to influence and lead the design and delivery of public services.
HOW ARE YOU GOING TO DO IT?
We have developed a unique approache to achieve meaningful youth leadership of public services. The key component is putting young people - our ‘Changemakers’ - in strategic roles within delivery organisations. For example, Changemaker Darren Irvine has advised Government Office North East on the impact of the 2012 Olympics in the region. Tiana Golden used her experience of being in care to support the development of more effective services for Barnardos. These young people are not there to ‘represent’ - they are there to get on and do what needs to be done. It’s about actions, not words. We will augment this inspirational youth leadership with a package of change management tailored to the needs of each ‘Host Organisation’.
WHO WILL BENEFIT?
Young people will benefit from more credible and authentic services that truly meet their needs. Service providers will benefit from the unique insight of the young people who consume their services in order to provide higher quality and better focused delivery. Government will benefit from the trialling of a wide range of approaches which can be scaled up and implemented elsewhere. Society will benefit by being more legitimate in the eyes of young people through their involvement in the services it provides. This can help to reduce disaffection and the associated negative impact of this.
For me the really challenging and interesting aspect to this approach is finding enough opportunities for other young people to follow the lead of those that have ‘made it’ - those that have become skilled & confident enough to get their views across etc. without having to be in a traditional formal structure (and also if they are in one!).
The predicament is that without finding opportunities to ’scale’ this approach, that small group of young people actually become regarded as ‘professional young people’ themselves. We have a similar situation where we have a small group of young people who like Tiana have had unique opportunities and have become very confident, very capable and very valuable assets for our work (and others they’re now involved with).
A couple of years ago when we were running a large programme that offered regular opportunities for young people to become involved at different levels as volunteers it seemed to be very effective as a kind of ‘conveyor belt’ for young people to progress both with us and in their personal skills. Since the funding for that programme ran out we now have less opportunities and the distance between our most capable young people and potential new volunteers is much greater and this in itself seems to be offputting as young people find it harder to relate to the young people leading their training and events etc.
So the challenge is having got some good young leaders, then finding ways to keep others coming through ad I think opportunities like this would definitely help. I’m guessing too that the essence of this idea is to provide those opportunities for young people who would ordinarily have less opportunities available to them and this is something I’d very much like to try and support - especially along the lines of the Positive Youth Development approach - good luck
There is no doubt, as Mike says, that this is a challenge. What we’ve found is that opportunities to ‘get on and do’ rather than ’sit around an talk about it’ are inherently more interesting to a wider range of young people that more traditional participatory or ‘democratic’ approaches.
There is a capacity issue but we are now trying to work more intensively with a smaller group of organisations over a longer period of time to embed youth leadership in their culture. For example, Darren, who I mentioned in my original blog posting, is in the third cohort of young people we have worked with via Government Office North East. GONE has undoubtedly changed over that three year period, not just in how it engages with young people but the wider community as well.
definitely agree with that and I hope with all the current emphasis on ‘participation’ there can be a bit more support and open mindedness to stuff like this. Hopefully I’ll get the chance to chat more - maybe at the Festival