You’re Welcome Participation Toolbox

March 2010

A wide range of resources, often developed through generic youth work practice, is available to practitioners and agencies to support the development of participatory work.  Many of these toolkits and publications are being used within the North East region to build the capacity of health professionals and health services to meet the requirements of the You’re Welcome initiative.  Examples include national training programmes such as Act by Right and Ready Steady Change; national assessment frameworks such as Hear by Right and practice guidelines and toolkits.  In addition there are training materials and other resources that have been developed at a local level sometimes with the active involvement of young people.

The Regional Youth Work Unit was commissioned to capture what participation resources currently exist and to ascertain their relative qualities.  The intent is to:

•    Record the current participation resources being used to support young people’s participation within the North East.
•    Identify relative advantages and disadvantages of the resources.
•    Identify gaps that may exist i.e. what resources need to be developed.

The report makes recommendations for future development and includes an analysis of appropriate resources and training to support participation work.  The range of resources has been selected to cover various purposes and to reflect a variety of approaches and models.  Overall the description and practice commentary should provide sufficient information to practitioners and managers wishing to develop specific projects and initiatives to select appropriate resources.

It was intended that the research would focus on generic participation resources with particular attention being paid to the current health work being undertaken within the North East with young people.  In addition, it was intended to focus on resources which have been used to reach and engage particularly marginalised groups.  The list of materials does not constitute a comprehensive review and there are many other publications and sources of support available to practitioners and managers.  In presenting the materials the report has focused on the most popular and reflects the criteria above.

The intention has been to facilitate practitioners and managers in selecting appropriate resources from those listed in order to support a particular function or initiative.  It may well be that practitioners will want to select elements from the individual resources in order to create a bespoke set of exercises to address a specific situation and/or audience.

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You’re Welcome Training Report

May 2010

The Regional Youth Work Unit – North East (RYWU-NE) was awarded a tender to deliver training to both health professionals and young people with the joint aims of:

• Enhancing the knowledge and skills of health professionals to enable their effective engagement with young people in health service planning, delivery, assessment and evaluation.
• Skill up groups of young people to assess health services against the You’re Welcome quality criteria using a range of appropriate methods.

The training was designed to take place over a one day session and a key learning component of the training was to bring together young people and health professionals to share their own experiences and learning. The training days were therefore delivered simultaneously to young people and health professionals.

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