What it takes to support young people to take the lead
PAC is funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, the #iwill Fund (a joint investment between The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) and the Co-op.
The Peer Action Collective (PAC) sees Delivery Partners across England and Wales supporting young Peer Researchers, Social Action Leads and Changemakers to uncover, and find solutions to, the root causes driving youth violence in their respective communities.
They find themselves in a unique role – striking a balance between supporting young people with their ‘youth worker’ hats on, and mentoring and managing them in their paid roles. Opportunities to ‘press pause’, step-back and reflect on their own experiences of delivering the programme can be easily overlooked, in favour of meeting the needs of their young people and supporting them to achieve key deliverables associated with the programme.
With this in mind, we recently facilitated a PAC Away Day at Co-op HQ in Manchester, creating a space for Delivery Partner leads to come together, away from younger members of the team, and share learnings from their experiences of supporting young leaders. The day was filled with activities that prompted reflection and surfaced insights around what it takes to support ambitious youth-led research and social action. These insights will soon be turned into a framework to share with organisations in the youth sector working with young people to create change.
To encourage staff to step into a reflective headspace, we asked them to respond to the following prompt at the beginning of the day: how would you summarise your experience of delivering PAC as a project to date in one sentence? Copying their responses into a Pantoum, we created three poems and asked members from the collective to read these aloud at the end of the day, in front of a backdrop drawn by Camille Aubry, a live illustrator who captured what surfaced across the day, in real time. Here you can see these videos:
For me, their words reflect just how much they care about creating change through youth voice, as they do about the young people those voices are coming from, and I’m grateful to work alongside a network of partners who have approached the work of PAC with the sensitivity, compassion and understanding needed to engage young people with lived experiences of the very challenges we’re trying to solve.
Written by Ruth Stables, Innovation Practitioner, The Young Foundation
Image credit: Camille Aubry
