Youth-led joy
What does it mean for a project to be truly youth-led?
We believe that all young people deserve to experience the joy of discovering their own passions. And what’s crucial is that young people themselves lead this search.
Initiatives for young people will come and go over time and are inevitably influenced by a range of external factors. We believe that young people are best placed to develop ideas that meet their own needs, wants, and values. That’s why we seek to share power with young people and invest in activities that enable youth-led ideas.
So how can we (our team at the Ferdinando and Luigi Innocenti Foundation and the sector as a whole) support them to do just that? What are the structures and systems that need to be in place so that young people really can discover their passions and strengths and lead their own futures?
While we’re learning what works and where we can bring most value to young people, we’re working closely with others who have been doing it for some time including organisations like BBC Children in Need and Big Change.
Putting young people in the driving seat
We’re funding 15 projects with BBC Children in Need this year that put young people in the driving seat. The purpose of one of these projects is to give young people from Newport in South Wales a £10k budget to use on activities that they choose as a group, that enable them to have fun and discover their passions. They’ve chosen to use the funds to get to know their home country of Wales. They highlighted a lack of access to nature for themselves and their peers which they felt has contributed to a lack of knowledge and skills as well as appreciation for the place they live in.
So, the group have planned a series of excursions that will take them to three different natural environments - the beach, mountains and rivers. They’ve chosen experiences which will immerse them in the natural environment, allow them to develop skills like water safety and team work, encourage them to push themselves out of their comfort zones and create wonderful lasting memories.
They will, of course, have the support of experienced instructors as well as qualified youth workers to experience surfing, coasteering, gorge walking and mountain hiking while gaining an understanding and appreciation of the country they live in. They will learn about the rich culture and incredible natural environment around them, expand their horizons, strengthen connections with their friends and have a great time. These are ambitions that Ferdinando and Luigi Innocenti themselves would firmly approve of – after all, their most famous invention, the Lambretta scooter was all about bringing fun and freedom to young people!
We were thrilled to be able to visit them last month to find out how it’s going. From the queue of 20+ young people outside the youth club doors waiting for it to open, it was clear from the outset this club is special and important to them.
They’re eight months into this project and we heard about how they worked together to shape their plans, book in activities and prepare for each one. They’ve been on eight trips out of 14 so far including camping, surfing, coasteering, a trip to Zip World, and hiking up Sugar Loaf hill.
Ellyse Davies who is leading the project said, “At first, they were excited and apprehensive about having so much money at their disposal. But they really enjoyed having a say and bringing in others beyond the design group. They all knew they wanted to get out of Newport, see different places and try new things. And the trips they’ve been on so far have opened so much to them, I think it’s built a deeper sense of belonging, to their environment and each other.”
Ellyse and the group have written about their experiences in this beautifully thoughtful blog.
Learning how to do ‘youth-led’ well
We’re working together with our friends at BBC Children in Need to learn from this project and explore how to do ‘youth-led joy’ well. As with all our projects, we will use the following measures to assess their impact:
Sense of agency – their ability to make choices about actions that affect their lives.
Self-efficacy – their belief that they can achieve what they set their mind to.
Sense of fulfilment – discovering things that matter to them.
John Lowes from BBC CiN has shared his thoughts with us:
“Co-creating with young people, putting them in the driving seat, is so important to us and this partnership has inspired us to look at how we bring youth-led into all aspects of our work. We’re now doing more place-based projects and bringing young people more deeply into the creation of those, just like the Newport project we’re doing with the Ferdinando & Luigi Innocenti Foundation.
In this project, we see signs the co-creation has worked well from the quality of the ideas that we’ve had back from the group. I think that’s because we’ve been working with youth groups who already have youth participation, youth voice at the heart of them. What we need to explore next is ‘why are they good at it? What is the community of practice that we can build out from as we learn what good looks like in this space?’”
Sharing what works
As a new foundation, we set out to do something new and useful. We didn’t want to duplicate the great work that is already happening across the youth sector.
Our ambition is to ‘spark joy’. That’s why we chose to invest in ideas and projects that have been created and developed by young people so that they can discover new passions, have fun, find purpose in life and experience the joy of leading their own personal growth.
We’re eager to learn and share what works most effectively in sparking joy for young people.