Participation strategies – when you don’t work directly with young people

We'll wrap this blog up shortly but we've got one more "voice and influence" contribution reflecting on a participation strategy for umbrella organisations, this from Ellie Munro, one of The NYA's participation consultants:    

It can be difficult to create a participation strategy if your organisation does not work directly with young people. This was brought home to me when helping Y Care International to scope existing participation and identify recommendations for embedding it within the charity.

The charity itself supports a lot of excellent projects with the most deprived young people across the world, through a network of YMCAs. Projects include working with young offenders and young people in gangs, young people affected by HIV, and child soldiers. It also runs global youth work projects with YMCAs in the UK and Ireland. Projects are encouraged to involve young people from beginning to end, and the charity helps them, through training, to gain the skills and resources they need.  The difficulty is in making sure young people can be involved internally as well.

When using Hear by Right to check where you are and where you need to go, it is imprtant to identify exactly what you are trying to map. What does “young people” mean to your organisation – is it younger children, under 18s, under 25s or have you not got an age-based definition? The latter is fine, providing the group is at least defined as the “users” of the service, or those who are supposed to benefit from it. Are you trying to map the whole organisation or just one team? It might be helpful to think about what parts of the organisation make decisions that affect young people's services and lives. What is important to remember is that you are not mapping the services you support. If appropriate, you may want to encourage them to produce their own maps and plans, based on their own priorities, but ultimately it must be their responsibility, as they will have their own challenges to face.

A real benefit of involving young people internally is the lessons you learn. By embedding service users' participation within the organisation you gain a better understanding of what good participation is, what methods work and how to overcome the barriers that you will inevitably face. This puts you in a better position to support the organisations you oversee in involving young people more effectively in their work, and ultimately improving their services and their lives.