Tips from young people on hosting youth-led events

Written by Michael and Helen, two of our young event facilitators

Young people need to be involved in the decisions that affect us. It’s a nice tag-line, but what does this mean in practice? For us, it’s about a shift in power that moves away from traditional actors in, for example, government or civil society and towards young people. 

Involving young people in making decisions is important because it benefits both you as an organisation and the young person as an individual. 

When we are at the table, we offer a new perspective. Young people are creative and aspirational and what we have to say is true to our own diverse experiences.

In return, we are given an opportunity that is unlike any we can get in schools or clubs. We don’t need to have top grades or be fully-fledged experts, but our perspective is valuable simply because we are young people. We get the chance to experience how it feels to make an impact and gain insight into how companies are working to make a difference. This is especially meaningful when the opportunities to get involved relate to our own life experiences. If you want to design a campaign whose target audience is young people, who better to tell you what works than us.

Co-op’s first youth-led hackathon 

Over the last few months, we’ve had the great joy of working with a wonderful team of young people from across the UK, with support from youth development agency HUDL, to co-design and facilitate a hackathon-style event for Co-op and the Co-op Foundation. 

Hackathons are a type of event that have their origins from the technology sector, where people come together to collaborate in order to solve a problem or identify new opportunities. For our event, we brought together young people from across the Co-op and Co-op Foundation community. This included young people who receive support from projects funded by Co-op Foundation, young Co-op colleagues, members of Co-op’s Barnardo’s Youth Advisory Group and Peer Action Collective and pupils from the Co-op Academies Trust. We wanted to hear first-hand from them what they need to meaningfully work with organisations like Co-op and the Co-op Foundation.

From the start, Co-op and Co-op Foundation wanted the event to be youth-led – and it truly felt like our event. In the months leading up to the hackathon, a team of young people, including us both, came together to co-design this event with the Co-op Foundation. Together, we designed every prompt, analysed each slide deck and made sure we could create a space where young people would feel empowered to speak up about how Co-op and Co-op Foundation can best work with them. That preparatory work  meant that we had created the materials we’d be using to facilitate the event, which we feel made for more effective engagement on the day.

Something that anyone who has the privilege of working with young people knows well is that they can tell from a mile off when something is inauthentic. They know when something is just for show or merely tokenistic. Yet the flip side of that is when we involve young people properly by shifting power to them, they also notice!

This is something we really noticed during our event: young people knew this was for them, and by them. This helped them to feel more comfortable in engaging with us as facilitators. This helped create a safe space where young people felt able to speak up about what they really needed to be able to work with organisations like Co-op and Co-op Foundation more effectively. 

Our top tips, as young people, for supporting youth-led events

Following our recent experience of designing and facilitating a hackathon, we wanted to share some tips for organisations looking to involve young people in any future events they may be looking to host themselves:

1. Make sure young people’s involvement feels meaningful and authentic. In order to give their perspective, young people need to feel valued. You can achieve this by removing barriers to involvement, providing relevant training and enabling young people to play to their strengths. For instance, making sure young people who are interested in designing or facilitating an event understand that previous experience is not required and that training will be provided where needed.
   
   
2. Co-production and co-designing are also very important. If you let young people help shape the project, this signals to other young people that they will be listened to and gives them reassurance and the confidence to speak up.
   
   
3. Don’t forget to share the impact of young people’s involvement! If they helped make social media content, let them know when it goes live. If they helped write copy, tell them where it is going to appear. Seeing that they have made an impact is going to help them feel valued, and is more likely to inspire them to come back and do it again!
   
   
4. Create and uphold a culture that focuses on treating others the way you’d like to be treated.  For example,  if you want young people to share their own thoughts, perhaps on topics they wouldn’t usually discuss or haven’t discussed before, you need to do the same. This helps level the field and make them feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts too.
   
   
5. Ensure your event is accessible to all. This can take a bit of time and effort, especially when it comes to understanding what the needs are, but it is worth it. Taking the time to do this helps engage those whose views we often need to hear most. 
   
   
6. Finally, provide opportunities where young people can make a tangible difference. This can be really incredibly rewarding! In our event, we offered young people an opportunity to shape the decisions being made by a business and a foundation. Giving them a tangible opportunity – something incredibly real – gets both a response in terms of participation for the organisation, but also joy to the young person who gets involved.

Next steps

Young people shared so many valuable suggestions for how Co-op and Co-op Foundation can meaningfully involve young people in their work and we can’t wait to share these with you next month. 

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