Participation: What’s the Point?

August 25th, 2008 by Hugh | Filed under Participation & Citizenship.

(Guest Post by Hugh Doyle, outgoing Project Manager for the Youth Participation Project (YPP) in Donegal)

In the early days of YPP, from our base in a small office in Drumany Old Church in Letterkenny, Bill Vaughan and I, ably supported by Project Coordinator Gerry McGeady, set about our task of “Capacity-Building for participation the population of young people and service providers in the North West” or so the Action Plan said anyway! We first set about developing reference groups of young people all across the North West. In this way young people looked at specific themes (mainly Alcohol and Drugs, Mental Health and Sexual Health) and presented their ideas to service planners, managers and providers at our first conference, Right to Be, in the Everglades Hotel in Derry on the 2nd December 2005. The planners and managers were highly impressed with the insight and knowledge those young people showed that day and why wouldn’t young people show what they are capable of given the right support and opportunities? In fact 10 managers were so impressed that day that they stood up and made specific commitments to take on board what the young people were saying about their service. they also promised to report back in 12 months time at YPP’s 2nd conference.

2006 saw YPP take a different tact. The reference group model was proving to be difficult to sustain and we moved to working with and supporting groups that were already in place in local communities. This proved more productive as we weren’t trying to develop new groups but we were supporting groups that already had their own identity and had a life beyond YPP. In August 2006 we enlisted YoMo for the first time for a training programme in Gartan Outdoor Education Centre. 7 groups went away from Gartan with plans to develop youth-led projects in their own communities. This in turn had a very productive effect on the communities involved.

On the 1st December 2006, Right to Be - The Return, took place with five groups of young people from across the North West presenting really excellent examples of participation in their own area or group. Importantly too, those 10 planners and managers from 2005 came back to tell around 200 young people how they got on trying to implement the young people’s ideas. Each told their story, each having varying degrees of success. However a marker was made for the need for dialogue to take place around service planning.

2007 saw YPP move through various funding extensions and applications. YoMo training sessions for both young people and youth workers continued with generally a great deal of success. March 2007 also saw YPP delivering a European training event on Youth Participation and Active Citizenship. In February and June we organised workshops with Investing in Children (IiC) from Durham and the work around partnership building with IiC is set to continue.

The main event of 2008 saw our 3rd and final conference taking place. From Here to Where? brought together those interested in participation from all over the country, north and south and from further a field, including England, Scotland, Nicaragua and Australia.

So what is the point of participation any way? Many of you reading this will probably be more able to answer this as I have witnessed much great participation work taking place that had started before YPP was ever created. Harry Shier, from Cessema in Nicaragua, sums up well why we should be doing this work in his ongoing research, Children as Public Actors: Navigating the Tensions, presented at the YPP conference in April of this year. The following is a quick attempt to apply Harry’s 15 Tensions to the story of YPP:

Tension 1: The child as consumer (service user) V. The child as activist
For me I really dislike referring to young people or adults for that matter as consumers or users of services. Its far too clinical and set up unhelpful divisions between adults and young people and between service providers and communities. Participation that has a point should be putting young people as equals who are an active role to play to making their lives and their communities better.

Tension 2: Adult agendas V. Children and young people’s agendas
Despite our best intentions in YPP I believe we did not enlist young people’s opinions often enough on how the Project developed and relied too much on our own ideas.

Tension 3: Consultation V. Shared Decision-making
Consultation is better than nothing, so long as its not just lip service. But shared decision making between service providers and young people I only came across a few. In my experience this type of equality more readily takes place in the local community where they I’ve experienced many genuine examples of shared-decision-making.

Tension 4: Invited Spaces V. Popular Spaces
An easy one! In the early days of YPP we tried creating reference groups who would shadow the various sub-groups of the Children’s Services Planning process. A noble ideal but one which is unfortunately doomed to failure without huge resources being allocated and even then the result is tenuous. However service providers going along to where young people naturally gather that’s a winner - whether that’s sitting on the stairs in the youth club or in the park - participation can take place any time, any place, anywhere.!

Tension 5: Reactive Participation V. Pro-Active Participation
Another easy one! Participation is most effective when it comes from young people being interested in something themselves and them getting support from adults to tackle the issue.

Tension 6: Manipulated Voices V. Autonomous Voices
As plain as day: It’s more genuine for young people to struggle through some piece of public speaking and can have a greater effect on the listener than to have something overly rehearsed.

Tension 7: Legitimising the existing Power Structure V. Challenging it
A difficult one, but I like to think YPP that challenge existing power structures.

Tension 8: A Public Services Framework V. A Human Rights Framework
It’s not about the service but about people!

Tension 9: Youth Participation V. Children’s Participation
YPP did not focus on younger children, given scope and resources, but obviously this is a hugely important area and one that needs to be specifically catered for.

Tension 10: Mimicking Adult Structures V. Inventing New Ones
Similar to Tension 4.

Tension 11: Child Protection V. Child Empowerment
Obviously child protection is vitally important but it shouldn’t be used as an excuse to disempower young people.

Tension 12: Local and Close-to-home issues V. National and Global Issues
Liam Cairns, director of Investing in Children sums up this Tension well when he retells what a young man said who they worked with:
“I’m not interested in your grand plans and strategies – I want to change things where I live my life”.

We might be very busy trying to influence policies and strategies but are we making a difference to the lives of young people? If not talk to the young people!!

Tension 13: Intrinsic Motivation (Rewards) V. Extrinsic Motivation
An age old argument that YPP did not solve should we pay or reward young people for their work? I don’t know is the truthful answer just work this one out for yourself by whatever feels right.

Tension 14: Getting a quick result V. Including everybody
It is difficult to include every group all of the time, but in YPP experience those projects that were rushed through because of deadlines generally weren’t the most successful.

Tension 15: One-off Projects V. Long-term Development
Finally if you really want to gain the trust and confidence of young people you need to stick around and provide opportunities over a long period of time. The experience and skills gained by one group of young people should also be handed over to the next group of young people that come along in a community.

So that’s it for me, it’s time for me to say goodbye, but that doesn’t mean participation is ceasing in the North West, far from it. Communities and groups will still continue to do what they do best and YPP Board Members are still about.

For me I’m heading back to college to do a PGCE in Queen’s. Hopefully I’m going to put what I’ve learned in YPP into practice in the classroom! Good luck in all your participatory escapades and thanks for sharing the journey for a while and maybe our paths will cross again in the future.

Hugh