Opportunities for young people to participate
| For youth participation to take place, there must be spaces and opportunities for it to happen. There are different types of opportunities for participation, with differing levels of youth leadership. |
These can be categorised as:
- Consultation – young people are asked for their input to inform decisions made by adults.
- Collaboration – young people and adults work together and make decisions side-by-side.
- Youth-Led – young people make decisions at all stages of a process, adults may support this, but it is driven by young people.
Opportunity | What does this look like? | Examples |
|---|---|---|
Consultation | Young people are appointed to roles, asked their opinion and informed about decisions. Adults set-up the space and use the information gathered to inform their work and decision-making. | On a national or regional level:
At a local level:
|
Collaboration | Young people and adults work together and share power. This can happen in multiple different ways:
Adults’ power changes in these different contexts – from playing an equal role, to being more supportive, to being more dominant. | On a national or regional level:
At a local level:
|
Youth-Led | Young people set the direction, make all decisions, and plan & execute the majority of actions.
| On a national or regional level:
At a local level:
|
Some practices are more applicable and/or appropriate depending on context, setting, and the group of children or young people we are working with. Therefore, we do not always have to be striving to be completely youth-led. By creating opportunities for participation across each category we ensure that young people are supported adequately, are not burdened with complete responsibility for everything, and are able to engage in a way that is appropriate for them.
What opportunities are not examples of Meaningful Youth Participation?Manipulation: Adults use young people to support their own projects and pretend they are the result of young peoples’ inspiration.
Decoration: Young people help implement adult’s initiatives. It seems that there are young people in the decision-making structures but in practice all decisions are taken by the adult advisors.
Tokenism: Young people have little or no influence on their activities. They are apparently given a voice, but in fact have little or no choice about the subject or the style of communicating it, and little or no opportunity to formulate their own opinions.
These are all examples of non-participation or seeming participation, that is not genuine or meaningful. If you are familiar with Hart’s (1992) Ladder of Youth Participation, these are the bottom three steps of the ladder. |
When deciding on the most appropriate type of opportunity for participation we may also take into account the goal(s), design and resources of the programme or activity.
Overall, our intention should be to increase the number of opportunities across each of the categories, at all levels of our work.
In Girl Guiding and Girl Scouting, we want to:
- Stop any practice that includes no or non-meaningful participation.
- Start to upskill and share existing and upcoming learnings around collaborative and youth-led methodologies, demonstrating more practice in this space.
- Continue good existing practice in the consultation space and build this into everything the Movement does.
Reflect and challenge yourselfWhat do you need to stop, start and continue doing to help create more opportunities for meaningful youth participation in your work? |
