In My Back Yard - Inspiring Community Change

In My Back Yard: Inspiring Community Change In My Back Yard is an innovative and grassroots programme running across the UK to tackle child poverty by facilitating Children and Young People to inspire change in their local area, in their ‘backyard’.

Save the Children in Wales is currently working in low income areas in Cardiff with groups of children and young people who learn about child poverty and complete a change project to try and tackle child poverty related issues in their community.

Practice examples and recommendations These guidance notes have been developed in order to create a unifying framework around which teams can deliver projects in an environment that ensures children and young people have genuine ownership and participation in all aspects of planning and delivery.

The groups with whom we work are diverse in terms of needs, skills, age, background, group and partner contexts and interests. The Programme Officers and Project Officers play a crucial role in supporting the groups to be effective often in challenging environments.

Project officers seek to engage with children and young people who live in communities where engagement in this type of project is rare and difficult, and where participants have had bad experiences of being consulted to no affect.

Most communities do not start with strong groups in terms of their ability to engage and participate even where the partner organisation may be a strong service delivery organisation and run an apparently established group.

The success of a group and the quality of project outcomes relies heavily on the quality of relationship between staff and participants, and on the degree to which staff are flexible in meeting participants at the point at which they can and want to engage. Skills, confidence and ambition is grown from there. Not from an assumed starting point of ability.

How to engage with hard to reach children and young people?

Managing expectation is key. In reality the level of individual expectation within a group ranges from the highest to the lowest. However children and young people often find it difficult to meaningfully engage in project work if they have been disappointed by past experience and have resulting low expectation of what can be achieved. Of course, it is equally important to

manage but not dampen the enthusiasm of children and young people who have exceptionally high expectations of their group’s ability to change the world without allowing them to believe in false promises.

Expectation takes careful relationship management to establish and is essential to maintain a cohesive group structure with positive but realistic expectations. It is important to agree what the children and young people want to achieve at the start of a project so that all members know what they are aiming towards. Part of the Project Officer role is to manage the choice of outcomes to a degree that allows the group to decide it’s own outcomes but make choices that are achievable.

What is meaningful engagement?

Practice Examples •

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Meeting with Cardiff Children and Young People’s Partnership Child Poverty Strategy Group. Children and young people devised a meeting plan, chaired and delivered the meeting to give the panel a child’s view of poverty issues.

Cardiff CYPP consultation with children and young people regarding the Children and Families (Wales) Measure. The group went through a range of training exercises which enabled them to give valid opinions based on complex documents and issues.

Making films to demonstrate their views and to showcase their group achievements. See the ‘Voices to inspire change’ video which accompanies this article.

Child Poverty summit 12th November 2010. Four groups of children and young people led presentations devised to inform decision makers of the issues each group faces in their community and solutions they devised for a better future.

Tips to deliver a successful project.

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Aspiring to make a difference, a group must want their project to work, it must matter to them. They must believe they are able to make a difference in their community and to wider society. The project can be small or big, but they must care about the outcome, they must own it.

Treat the children and young people as experts, because they are!

Be their PA…always remember you are working for them.

Find safe ways to talk about sensitive issues for example telling stories or designing characters.

Ensure the group is a safe environment for members to express themselves.

Do what you say you will do.

Meaningful participation from children and young people How do you get to the point of meaningful engagement?

Ensure that children and young people are telling you the story that they want to tell. Let them find their own way through a range of activities that generate a flow of discussion and interest. Let the children and young people use whatever medium they feel most comfortable with, drawing, video, text, whatever they prefer.

Build skills to ensure that they can put their messages across in terms of learning to negotiate, learning to have constructive discussions and debates, learning to take turns, managing expectation of group discussions and outcomes for themselves.

Inspire and enthuse your group, bring them to a level where they have an understanding of the relevant issues and can meaningfully contribute and genuinely understand the discussion. They must want to be involved and have views they want to contribute?

This takes time, a calm, positive, reassuring approach that instils confidence and a sense of belonging, pride and achievement in being part of a group.

How to set up a workshop

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Ground rules need to be explained and set. The group need to understand what ground rules are and why they are useful.

The group need to devise their own ground rules. They must own them, respect them and enforce them from the inside.

Make complex issues and documents accessible.

Learn about them, learn about the community and build a map of what is important to them.

Understand the group dynamics.

Manage the diversity of expectation.

Build trust and a safe space. Be open and respect the ground rules set by the children and young people.

Be consistent.

The group belongs to the children and young people.

It’s the little things that matter.

As things start to come together 

Give the group the time and space to build their own picture of where they live, what the what to achieve, what are their hopes and aspirations. Get to know them and let them get to know you.

Is it genuine? Is it really their voice?    

Make sure the contribution of children and young people is their own story. Be sure you are really hearing their voice, NOT yours?

Encourage an atmosphere that is safe, empowering and nurturing to enable the group and individuals to do the best that they can.

Encourage and support aspiration.

Anything is possible. Below are some examples of projects where Save the Children Officers have helped children and young people to identify community issues that are important to them, express how they feel about them and then form partnerships with other agencies who can assist with positive action.

In My Back Yard – Inspiring Community Change If you want to know more about how Save the Children’s In My Back Yard programme can help you to engage meaningfully with children and young people in your community contact Gemma Bartlett at Save The Children Floor 3, Phoenix House 8 Cathedral Road Cardiff CF11 9LJ Phone 02920 396 838 g.bartlett@savethechildren.org.uk