The 12 days of co-production: reflecting on another successful year!

For the festive season, we thought we’d showcase some of our 2025 highlights through a “12 days of co-production” blog! Here we go:

12 (actually 13) Youth Advisory Panel members

This incredible group of young people have just hit their first anniversary with us – and what a year they’ve had! From feeding into our grant criteria and funding applications, to shaping our new brand and comms approach, and onwards to making proposals to our board of trustees (more on that later), the last 12 months have seen our Panel grow their confidence, expertise and relationships with each other to now be a hugely positive influence within Buttle and beyond.

We have 13 members but throughout the year tend to have 10-12 actively involved in our work, which is really impressive. Their commitment, enthusiasm and ideas are an inspiration and challenge to our staff and trustees. We’re excited to see where they push us to go next!

11 monthly YAP meetings (so far)

Our Youth Advisory Panel meets every month online, discussing lots of different topics and ideas related to Buttle’s work. We’ve done 11 so far this year, covering topics such as grant giving criteria, social media strategies, funding applications, models of youth participation, fundraising ideas and charity governance. Our 12th (and final) meeting of the year is next week and will be a recap of everything we’ve achieved in 2025, with a bit of festive fun thrown in 🎄

10 interview panels

Incredibly, young people who received our grants have been on the interview panel for no less than 10 important roles for Buttle this year. This includes senior positions such as our Directors for Grants and Fundraising and our Board Chair, as well as key roles across all our teams: grants, fundraising and marketing, and finance and governance.

At every point, our young people have given insightful, reflective and pinpoint accurate feedback on candidates, helping our team grow stronger and ensuring youth voice is core to our recruitment processes.

9 risk assessments

Perhaps not as exciting as some of our other points, this “success” is more reflective of the commitment to and embedding of robust safeguarding processes in our co-production work. A good risk assessment is the foundation of ensuring that any activity or event is safe, enjoyable and inclusive for everyone involved. Our wraparound approach to safeguarding has meant we’ve been able to respond quickly to any challenges experienced or concerns raised by our young people, playing our part in keeping them safe and well.

8 strategic workshops

What’s really developed in our co-pro work this year is the level at which young people have been involved in strategic developments at Buttle. On top of their monthly meetings, our Youth Advisory Panel have taken part in 8 strategic workshops focused on different parts of our new strategy.

Through these, they have not only fed into and helped to launch our 2025-2030 strategy, they have also contributed to the development of our new Theory of Change which will guide our work for the coming years; had a significant say in the look and feel of our new brand (coming soon!); and helped shape our initial thinking on the deeper support we might offer to children and young people.

7 learning events with partners

We’re trying to be more proactive in sharing our learning about not just our grants but all of our work at Buttle, and our Youth Advisory Panel have been heavily involved in this over the last 12 months.

Members have spoken at the launch of our new strategy to share how they were involved in its creation; presented about our co-production projects at sector events such as the ACF’s Children and Young People Network; shared their experiences at fundraising events including our Women’s Giving Circle; and started influencing the thinking of other trusts and foundations by attending roundtables and learning circles run by organisations such as the Henry Smith Foundation and Smallwood Trust.

We’ve also started sharing learning with other youth boards, with members of our Panel joining a meeting of Centrepoint’s Lived Experience Board in October.

All of these events positioned our YAP members as experts in their own right with valuable contributions and insights to share on how to improve not just the work of Buttle, but of the sector more widely.

6 peer researchers

A real highlight of this year has been working on our Beyond Estrangement project with our young steering group. We recruited six estranged young people to guide this research project, which assumed to explore the experiences of LGBTQ+ young people with little or no support from their families.

The group has been central to the entire piece of research, from designing reach questions and methodologies, to carrying out interviews and focus groups and interpreting findings.

We’re now working with them to plan the comms and launch of the report – look out for this in March 2026!

5 Buttle films

This is a bit of a sneaky one as we’ve not finished them yet, but our Youth Advisory Panel have had a lot of fun (and serious moments) working on a set of four co-produced films to help us improve how we talk about Buttle to the wider world. They worked with a specialist film company to develop key messages for the films, plan and storyboard them. We then spent most of our recent residential capturing the content for the films, with more sessions planned in to edit and sign off the final cuts. We can’t wait to see how they turn out!

The fifth film is currently being created by the young steering group for our Beyond Estrangement project, who are working on an animation to share the findings of their research. This will be launched along with the report in March 2026. So many exciting things to come in the new year!

4 YAP members delivering a lunch and learn

Another recent event which was a great success was a lunch and learn with our staff and trustees, led by 4 members of our Youth Advisory Panel. The session was planned and chaired by YAP members, who spoke about who the YAP are, what they have done so far and their future plans for their work with Buttle. Their aim was to encourage more of our staff to reach out to the YAP with questions, ideas and sticky decisions they want input on. They’ll be joining our staff away days in the new year too!

3 Youth Advisory Panel residentials

While our monthly online YAP meetings are great, nothing beats getting the group together in person. We’ve managed to do this three times this year and each time we’ve been blown away by the teamwork, support, care and consideration the group have shown each other.

As their relationships have grown, so has their ability to work together and produce some incredible work. Look out for the films they created in their latest residential which will be launched along with our new brand early in 2026!

2 trustee meetings

Hot off the press, this week we had five members of our Youth Advisory Panel join our annual trustee away day. This follows two of the group joining our Grants Committee meeting in the autumn. The YAP wanted a session with trustees to propose some approaches to build stronger working relationships between the Panel and our Board. Their initial meeting with the Grants Committee enabled them to test these ideas, them they share refined versions with the full Board this week.

The young people who joined set out the background and thinking behind their proposals and asked trustees to vote on whether to take them forward. As a result we’re now going to have a lead trustee for the YAP and a YAP representative on future Board meetings – both key asks from our Youth Advisory Panel!

1 co-production manager!

Our progress this year has shown that having a member of staff dedicated to this work is really important in driving co-production and youth engagement forward in an organisation.

Really, it’s all about relationships – and you need a key contact for young people to engage with, get to know and who gets to know them, shows interest in their wider lives and understands their contexts to build these relationships. This helps an organisation to create and deliver responsive, sensitive and inclusive co-pro work which is person-centred and can adapt to young people’s ever changing priorities and living situations.

While we want co-pro to be embedded across our organisation, or learning is that having one person leading this and championing it across all teams is key to a successful year of co-production!