Creating Buttle UK’s Youth Advisory Panel
In recent months, our Co-Production and Youth Engagement Manager has been working with a group of young people who have received our grants to design Buttle UK’s Youth Advisory Panel. In this blog, we hear from our Co-Pro Manager and one of the young participants about their experience of being involved.
We’re at a really exciting point in our co-production journey at Buttle UK. After building relationships with a group of young people who had received grants through our Chances for Children and Support for Boarding programmes, we brought them together to help us create our Youth Advisory Panel.
Having a Youth Panel to guide our decisions and influence our work has been an aim of ours for the last five years. However, we didn’t want to create the Panel without young people having a say in how it would run, as who are we to decide what would work best for the young people taking part?
With this in mind, we worked with a group of 13 young people between February and May to design our Youth Advisory Panel from scratch. This involved online meetings and a face-to-face residential, to thrash out the Panel’s name, model, aim, remit, membership, recruitment criteria and methods, and the training and support new members would need.
Following this, the group helped to write the information and online leaflet to promote the Panel, and this was sent out to 250 families and young people who had received our grants and said they were interested in doing more with us. To express their interest, young people had to write, film or voice record themselves answering three simple questions. Two of the young people from the group helped me to shortlist the 33 applications we received, and we had informal online chats with 20 of them.
I’m pleased to say we now have 13 inspirational and passionate young people ready to start as members of our new Youth Advisory Panel! Six of these young people have been involved in our previous projects, and seven are new to working with Buttle UK.
While this was definitely not the easiest way to go about creating and recruiting to our Youth Advisory Panel, there’s no doubt that involving young people in its design and recruitment has made it a much stronger and youth-centered model. The young people involved were brilliant: we had real lightbulb moments where members of the group shared valuable insights on how we can make the Panel diverse, inclusive and supportive. The two who were involved in recruiting members were fantastic, coming prepared to each stage of the process and providing reassurance to “interviewees”. We now have a set of Panel members who are very on board with Buttle UK becoming more youth-centred, and a model which will enable them to make a real difference to how we work.
Below is Menna’s reflections on being involved in creating and recruiting to our Youth Advisory Panel:
I’m a young person who was involved in creating The Youth Advisory Panel, as well as the recruitment process of it. This included having group discussions about how many people should be involved, what requirements are included in the recruitment process, age limits of recruiters etc. Multiple online meetings as well as in person meetings took place in order to perfect details in order to ensure The Youth Advisory Panel will work in practise.
The thing I found most interesting was how we managed to work so well as a team, although there were many young people as well as Buttle staff involved, therefore so many different opinions. I enjoyed getting to know new people and conversing with people who share the same aim and interest as me.
Working on this project has taught me to voice my opinions no matter what, do things outside of my comfort zone and many more things.
Watch this space for more info on the young people involved in our new Youth Advisory Panel. In the meantime, for more information you can contact coproduction@buttleuk.org.
