How to meaningfully involve young people in your work
Building communities of the future relies on co-operating with the young people that will inherit them. But how can we meaningfully involve young people in shaping our work if we don’t dismantle the barriers that prevent them from participating in the first place?
That’s a question we asked ourselves, and what inspired us to host an online hackathon event in July. We wanted to ensure the event was impactful, so we asked young people to take the lead on designing and facilitating it too. Youth development agency HUDL supported them to do this.
The hackathon was a truly collaborative event, bringing together young people from across Co-op and Co-op Foundation networks to understand how we can improve our youth participation work.
To celebrate the event, and share the learnings we gathered on the day, we’ve created a report. In the report, we outline the structure of the hackathon, recommendations put forward by young people on the day, as well as the key points they made throughout the wider discussions.
You can read the report in full here.
We’d like to say a big thank you to all the young people who joined our first online hackathon event and therefore contributed to the learnings we’re able to share today.
Youth voice matters
Amplifying the voices of young people, and ensuring they’re heard, is important to us at the Foundation. It not only helps us deliver on our youth-led vision but deliver on Co-op’s vision of creating more value for member owners every day, too.
We want young people to continue to grow into assured leaders of the future. But to do this, we need to understand the issues they’re facing right now and how we can work with young people to resolve them. We believe this will help them build the skills, experience and confidence to continue making positive, meaningful change for years to come.
Involving young people in your work is not only the right thing to do, but it can hugely benefit your organisation, too. Like us, if you want to not only build communities of the future but ensure they’re protected for years to come too, you need young people to achieve this. Additionally, sharing power with young people gives them a sense of ownership and responsibility for ensuring their efforts are both celebrated and maintained.
We understand organisations may be at varying stages of their youth participation work. That’s why we hope the report we have published today will help to provide some insight into how to work more effectively with young people.
Interested in learning more about how to host an event like our online hackathon? Read this blog from Helen and Michael – two of the young people who helped facilitate our first online hackathon event.
Next steps
We recently recruited more young people to our Future Communities Collective . The collective are a group of young people aged 17 to 25 who help shape our work and ways of working here at the Co-op Foundation. We’re looking forward to working with them over the coming months to understand how we can embed the outputs from the hackathon into our work.
At Co-op, the Co-op Young Members Group will use the hackathon outputs to shape their objectives for 2025 and help them reach their aim of helping more young members to influence decision making at Co-op.
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