What is Youth Participation?

July 22nd, 2007 by mas | Filed under Courses & Events, Participation & Citizenship.

Although I’d heard of the term ‘youth participation’ I’d never really took much notice of it until quite recently. There are lots of these sorts of terms - community engagement, social exclusion, active involvement & so on & so on. Cynically I’ve tended to think of this kind of jargon as mostly used by people in an attempt to give what they’re doing credibility and people that spend too much time discussing things rather than doing them. Certainly at the time I was far too busy doing things to spend time wondering about what to call it!

Our training evolved and developed largely from just getting on with it - its not true though to say that we didn’t have our own jargon and there definitely had been a lot of planning before we started. Once we started though we were so in the thick of things and it developed so quickly that its fair to say that for most of 6 years we didn’t spend much time doing anything other than getting on with delivering training courses and working on improving them.

Towards the end of this as we started to do more training for other organisations it was interesting listening to people describing our training. I still like hearing people explain what we do and very often they do a much better job of it than me. The things we hear most about our training are described as ‘participation’ and ‘peer education’.

About 3 years ago I took a phone call from someone interested in booking us to do some training with adults - she wanted us to organise a days event to help them understand children and young peoples participation. I asked her to explain what she meant by participation - after an awkward moment I prompted her; “do you mean looking at how to get young people involved in communities or organisations?” - “yes that sort of thing” she replied. I wasn’t trying to put her on the spot - I genuinely wanted to get an understanding of what she was after so that we could design the training. I only realised the irony of my question a few weeks later when I discovered she was in fact the “Participation Worker” for the local authority!!