A youth-led approach to mental health prevention
A toolkit to building a youth-led approach to tackle the mental health crisis in your neighbourhood.
Friday was #GreatMentalHealthDay, so we’ve decided to share a toolkit we developed as part of the project Kailo*. The toolkit aims to support local organisations (from local government to community groups) and young people in identifying and shaping the change needed to tackle the ongoing mental health crisis. You can access the full toolkit here, which sets out the three-phase approach: discover, design and embed. This blog introduces the four core concepts that guide our approach:
- Shifting ownership. From professional organisations to the communities they intend to serve.
- A whole system response. Bringing together local actors in a youth-led, yet locally connected approach.
- A flexible, person-centred approach. Four principles to guide the research and participation approach.
- A relational, networked approach. Using our relationship-centred practice to build the connections needed for success and sustainability, fast.
*Shift was part of the Kailo consortium from late 2021 to 2023, and led discovery research in Newham. This work was commissioned by the UK Prevention Research Partnership in the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fuel to an already growing fire that is the youth mental health crisis. Since, urgent referrals for young people have tripled, and this work sought to bring a new approach to how we define and act on drivers of poor mental health, bringing together academic, design and participatory practices — with mixed results!
Shifting ownership
We’re always interrogating our role in social change. We’ve written about our model and role for change in our blog, and for projects, try to map out how we’ll shift ownership (and value) away from ‘us’ (as social innovators — typically a combination of professional, academic and community orgs) towards the ‘community’ (an important thing to define in partnership — you can read more about what this looked like in Newham in the toolkit). It’s a complex line between facilitating and enabling change to dominating and extracting value, and it’s a line we sometimes land on the wrong side of.
Before a project has begun, there is a need for a group of organisations and individuals to come together around a problem or idea and apply for and receive funding. While we’re exploring other, community-led ways for funders to direct money towards change, this will be the norm in most traditional innovation programmes. This means before a project has kicked off, we’ve got to both establish meaningful power for the people who should be leading change — in this case, young people disproportionately impacted by poor mental health — and then remove the burden for individuals and organisations in a local area to participate (essentially, not asking young people to solve a crisis they didn’t create).
For youth-led mental health prevention, removing the burden looks like:
- Bringing together a group of young people who are representative of the issues locally (looking beyond ‘young people’ as an umbrella term and platforming those underrepresented).
- Carry out interviews and workshops to understand and map what the different challenges are for young people and youth groups locally.
- Facilitate ‘community forming’ sessions to surface where local energy exists across the whole system (see section below).
- Support young people with the skills and money they need to lead deeper research into priority challenges and design ideas that can prevent this.
- Support young people and the wider system to design, test and embed local solutions.
A whole system response
A youth-led programme should empower young people throughout its research and design phases to create the change that they want to see. However, we know that this change does not and cannot happen in a vacuum. Those with power and resources in the existing local system need to be present and committed throughout for sustained success. Equally, participation that leads to little action or is dominated by those with existing power can build distrust and apathy in young people participating. That’s why this approach should act as a bridge for local actors to create a whole system response — where young people and people in their local community are able to work alongside statutory organisations and community influencers to drive change.
To create a ‘whole system’ response, you need to identify a challenge that is a priority for everyone locally, i.e. there are a group of young people, community members, statutory organisations, and grassroots groups committed and resourced to take a problem forward into design. This should be carefully facilitated to make sure that existing power holders do not dominate what young people choose to drive forward. We designed a ‘circle’ structure for governance — where a small circle design group, with a mix of stakeholders hold decision-making power and lean on their immediate networks to overcome design decisions, with a big circle design group used to draw on knowledge and expertise from the wider local and sectoral ecosystem.
A flexible, person-centred approach.
By reflecting on what made the discovery phase successful (and, at times, less so), we created four principles for facilitators and researchers to follow:
- Trauma-informed. Protecting the safety of young people participating by considering the diversity of experiences a person may have and how that may impact their ability to participate, offering safe pathways for people to be involved or not.
- Intersectional lens. Understanding the intersections of identities or disadvantages a person might experience and how that may impact their mental health. This approach informs how we design safe and inclusive spaces for participation.
- Respectful of boundaries. Recognising that each person’s boundaries are different and can even move during the course of a project.
- Adaptive to environments. Conscious of the environments in which participation takes place and how to mindfully respond to these to support young people to participate in a way that they are comfortable with.
A relational, networked approach.
We believe in the power of relationships to drive positive change in society, that’s why we created the Relationships Project. We also know there’s something jarring about talking about relationships when we’re also talking about temporary research and design projects. That’s why for this work to be successful we need a relational, networked approach, where we’re using strong relationships as the foundations of our work, and leaving in place the relational infrastructure to ensure people and communities are supported going forward. This borrows community organising principles and the ‘snowflake model’ for distributed community leadership.
All the same, strong trusting relationships take time and local presence to build. They require a personal approach where the goal is the relationship, rather than the outcome that the relationship could bring. This requires community-building expertise, adaptability, and willingness to explore where relationships may lead.
Given the time constraints of a project like Kailo, and that the Kailo team may not be based locally, this approach relies on building strong, trusting and caring relationships with well-networked individuals and organisations in the local area. As these relationships are the foundation for these local networks, fair compensation and agency for relationship holders is vital.
Since publishing this blog, we’ve shared three reflections about working on mental health prevention that you can access here.
At the beginning of 2023, we ended our involvement in Kailo. This toolkit was designed to illustrate how we’d start again. This is still an ongoing project being led by UCL’s Peter Fonagy and Dartington Service Design Lab’s Tim Hobbs, and you can keep track of it’s progress here: https://kailo.community/
