Making Change Happen
Index
Making change happen
As you learned in Section Two, teamwork is the foundation of the YWC Program success. In particular, there are four integral roles in the program:
Think of these roles as different spokes on a wheel: to ensure sustainability, each of the roles come with specific responsibilities that complement and support each other.
For the best chance of success, ensure that that each role has at least one lead assigned to manage the role’s responsibilities; for Youth Champions the responsibilities can be split among a group of youth and young adults as long as one person oversees the tasks.
Remember
Remember collaboration is essential to the efficiency of the YWC Program! Learn more by clicking on one of the following roles, or read on for more information about training project leads.
- Public Health Lead
- Adult Allies
- Mental Health Lead
- School Staff Lead
- Youth Champion
Adult allies
Go to the Adult Leads Online Training
Recruiting Youth Champions
Youth Champions Training
Go to the Youth Champions Training Slide Deck
Orientation and Training Goals
Your Youth Champions training program should meet these objectives.
- Help raise student awareness of the mental health continuum (i.e., what is the difference between mental health and mental illness) and reduce stigma.
- Help students increase their confidence and develop advocacy and leadership skills.
- Help improve the health and well-being of children and youth through a focus on mental health promotion, acceptance of mental illness, reduction of related stigma and substance use prevention.
Each community should lend a local context to the YWC Program and network of Champions. A key opportunity for this: The Youth Champions Network Training and Workshop held in each local community. Dedicate the time you need to ensure a well-coordinated, effective day.
Pre-training considerations
Setting up your workshop
Ease tension!
When conversations become heavy or emotionally challenging, the YWC project team encourages you to co-create a series of “disruptors” – activities codesigned by youth and adult allies to help support psychological safety.
Disruptors can include activities such as brainstorming favorite music, YouTube videos, or internet memes that uplift or lighten the mood and are inspirational, fun and motivating. Seek youth input to develop a list of disruptor activities that can be used in your program!
Communicating about your training workshop
Make sure you share event details with everyone, including sending out frequent reminders of upcoming meetings and sessions to increase attendance.
Creating content for your workshop
Once you have carried out necessary planning arrangements for the Youth Champion training/workshop, you will need to focus on providing quality, impactful content. Focusing on engaging and involving Youth Leads in as many components and decisions regarding the workshop as possible will improve outcomes.
Additional tips include
- Encourage Public Health Staff Leads and Public Health Nurses to participate in training/workshop activities and facilitate small group discussions
- Encourage action-oriented, interactive and enjoyable activities
- Encourage creativity in the delivery of the training/ workshop and be patient with each individual’s process around preparation for presenting
- Provide incentives, recognition and resources
- Provide an opportunity at the training/workshop for students to start to develop a School Action Plan,
- Obtain workshop feedback (see Evaluation section)
Planning Youth-Led Activities
Youth engaged in the YWC Program will use knowledge and skills gained from their training to help support the implementation activities in their school alongside Public Health Staff and School Staff Leads.
Consider meeting with youth to start planning potential implementation activities.
Consider the following:
- Create safe space and actively listen to youth ideas and voice
- Have icebreakers at the meetings or energizers to create a positive environment. Allow them to be led by youth
- Consider doing a walk about the school to identify areas that can be addresses by locally youth led implementation activities. Tools such as (insert tool) can be used to support a school walk about
- Allow for a free flow of ideas for implementation activities from youth
- Consider meetings dedicated to planning and implementing activities or campaigns
- Consider using implementation tools to guide planning of implementation activities
- Debrief what went well and what could be improved regarding activities or campaigns
- Take time to review feedback together
- Celebrate successe
Remember
Remember to refer to Youth Engagement Principles when working with youth; where youth either co-develop or initiated activities in their school/community environment.
Implementing Youth-Led Activities
The YWC Program aims to engage youth, help them understand what works and what doesn’t work, so they can problem solve and find solutions that support mental health promotion among peers. That’s why the Initiatives ultimately developed by youth during the training/ workshop are such an important aspect of the program.
As part of the YWC Program, youth have developed a broad array of meaningful activities that promote awareness of mental health and substance use among peers and worked towards building resilient and supportive school. environments and communities.
Note:
Share these activities with Youth Champions as a jumping-off point to help set expectations and inspire new ideas.
You can help focus activities and narrow objectives to achieve desired outcomes by organizing activities into the following categories:
- creating safe spaces
- resource and service awareness campaigns
- stigma-reduction campaigns
- coping and stress management education and training
- caring and sharing moments
- acknowledging youth and their voices.
Resources
View all Resources and Tools
YWC program specific resources and tools to support Making Change Happen, and other related resources.
Other:
Next steps
Sustaining change
As you learned in Section Two, making change happen involves using innovative strategies to prepare to build leadership capacity in Youth Champions and the Adult Allies that support them.
