📜 How to engage disadvantaged groups in policy

It’s only hard to work with children if you think everyone thinks like an NGO strategist. It’s not that different working with young people than working with adults who aren’t used to talking about this kind of stuff. People think a strategy is something that has to have a very specific type of language, or you have to understand certain theories in order to develop one. A strategy is a plan, and anyone can be involved in planning.

This isn’t a linear process. We have to hold the process lightly so that children can participate in it, rather than wanting them to contribute like adults. So rather than ‘we’re doing one meeting and then we’re going to do this brainstorm’, be open to children wanting to ask you a bunch of random questions – that’s fine and you should go there. The challenge is giving ourselves the permission to take the time to really listen and understand what children want to talk about, to let ourselves go on tangents and end up in different places. Rather than the challenge being about ‘How do we get children to engage?’, it’s about how you get adults to.

The question I’d always ask is what will be different as a result of children’s input? If people can’t tell me that something will change, you shouldn’t be talking to children because you’re not actually interested in what they’re going to say.

For our Generation Hope campaign on the climate crisis and economic inequality, we ran a series of children’s hearings and listening exercises: focus groups, surveys, to better understand what children were thinking about these issues. The Youth Advisory Board played a leading role in developing the questions we were using, what the approach was going to be, which children we should be talking to, and how we should be approaching those children. They took the report on the results of the hearings and decided what resonated with them, and made their own decisions about how to share that – through videos, events and more. It was really exciting to see their footprint all the way through, from the strategic level through to when we were developing physical materials and talking about design decisions.