Implementation guidance: Implementation in a community setting

here are four key elements of implementing this approach within a community setting:

Agree leadership support

Create a youth voice charter

Utilise the Empowering Youth Voices Resource Pack

Take action

When implementing the toolkit within a community, practitioners should be aware of the makeup of their community, the different youth groups/organisations in the area, and find out if any local schools in the area are using the toolkit.

Agree leadership support

To support the implementation of this toolkit, it is important to agree support from leadership within the community setting, this may be from a youth work manager, community council, consortium, organisational board or leaders. To secure support, the toolkit approach must be explained in full. Utilise the summary presentation within the support materials section to help facilitate this.

Practitioners should agree support for:

The creation and implementation of a local community Youth Voice Charter. These will be the guiding principles for any adult who wishes to consult with children and young people. (If a local authority youth voice charter already exists, confirm its use within the community instead if suitable).

The use of the Empowering Youth Voices resource pack with the local community’s main youth voice structure(s) e.g. youth forum, youth action group.

Create a Youth Voice Charter

Firstly, it is important to find out if there is an existing youth voice charter within the local authority. If there is a local authority Youth Voice charter you should utilise this if suitable, if not, the creation of a charter should be facilitated.

A Youth Voice Charter is helpful to support a consistent, agreed and widely understood approach to consultation with children and young people. The charter outlines the principles that all adults should follow when they are consulting them.

The charter gives a mechanism to fully appreciate the way in which children and young people wish to be consulted, while ensuring that it is meaningful, non-tokenistic and supports accountability.

The charter should be made up of a number of statements and descriptive sentences that allow adults to understand the principles of how they should work with children and young people. Forth Valley and West Lothian have an example of a youth voice charter.

How to create a Youth Voice Charter

Step 1 – Consult

Create a consultation survey using the questions below as guidance. The survey should contain at least three questions similar to those below. If you already work with a youth voice structure such as a youth forum, local youth action group or other type of youth group, you may wish for them to develop their own questions. This consultation survey should be created in an accessible format.

Youth Voice Charter Consultation - Purpose

This survey is an important part of creating a youth voice charter, as it offers children and young people an opportunity to tell adults how they wish to be consulted. The responses then form the basis of the youth voice charter. The charter is the foundation of the Toolkit approach and forms a commitment that adults will consult with children and young people in a rights-based way.

Youth Voice Charter Consultation Survey - Example questions

How would you like adults to speak to you, when they want to hear your thoughts and ideas?

What could adults do to help you feel listened to and taken seriously, when they want to hear your thoughts and ideas?

What should adults do to treat you fairly and with respect, when asking your opinion?

What could adults do to make it easier for you to understand what they are asking you?

After you tell adults your ideas as part of consultation activities, what would you like them to do next?

Once the consultation survey is created, send it to different settings in the community, e.g. sharing in youth groups, community centres and schools, and other places that children and young people meet. Give children and young people the opportunity to complete the survey, and agree a time frame for completion.

Step 2 - Consolidate

Gather the results of the consultation survey. Depending on the quantity of responses, it may be helpful to distil some of the answers or present them in a table or spreadsheet, you may wish to utilise digital tools to support this. Ensure the consolidated responses are in a format that can be understood by children and young people.

Step 3 - Analyse

Present the consolidated views from the survey to any existing youth voice group or structures within the community. Allow time for the young people to analyse the views presented to them and give them the opportunity to identify the common themes, statements, phrases, words and ideas. Ask the group to share and discuss these common elements and select or present them as statements. To help aid this process and support discussion with young people you may wish to refer to the Forth Valley and West Lothian example or the Childrens Commissioner 7 Golden Rules for Participation

Step 4 - Create

Support the children and young people to take the common statements and compile these into a youth voice charter document. Ensure the document has key headings and descriptive text for what these headings mean in context. Share these with the youth voice structure (and other youth voice groups if possible) to confirm accuracy and agree the overall look of the youth voice charter.

Step 5 - Share

Now share the charter across the community setting, and ensure it is displayed and upheld across by all practitioners and leaders within the community. You may wish to create an area where the charter can be signed by leadership, or larger visual formats of the charter can be placed on wall displays.  

Note: School(s) in your locality may already have their own youth voice charter. If this is the case that charter is relevant to the formal education setting while your charter represents the wider community consultation principles. You may also choose to merge these if suitable.

Use the Empowering Youth Voices resource pack

Practitioner(s) leading youth voice within the community should now use the Empowering Youth Voices resource pack. This resource is based on the principles of peer research, and offers a practical way to upskill children and young people to consult their peers on themes that are important to them.

This pack can be used at any time and over any period, with recommendations on how to use it detailed in the Empowering Youth Voice resource section.

The second section of the pack can also be repeated at any point to support youth voice structures to consult on different themes and generate new youth voice action plans.

Note: if your local community does not have a youth voice structure you may use this resource with a local youth group, or use it as a starting point to create one.

Take action

The toolkit has now been implemented in the setting. Use the youth voice action plan that has been created to steer the next steps of how youth voice informs change and improvement. This should allow you to:

support the direction of the youth voice structure for the near future;
agree measurable ways to demonstrate that the actions within the plan are being achieved;
provide key information to leaders on how a wider representation of children and young people respond to questions surrounding a particular theme; and

agree future themes that may be consulted on using the social researcher method.

Providing a feedback loop to those that are not involved in a youth voice structure is also essential. Information on how to do this can be found in the measuring impact and sharing action section.