Over the last six months we’ve been working to create a new podcast series that showcases some of the learning from organisations funded by the Listening Fund. You can now listen on Spotify or Apple Music.
As the Learning Partner of the fund, we’ve had the privilege of hearing about how funded organisations are involving young people in their work and what they are learning. We’ve distilled and showcased some of this learning through our events, blogs and reports. But the highlight of our role has been facilitating in-depth discussions through peer learning groups.
Listening to practitioners sharing their experience and challenges, and supporting each other, we realised that we wanted to bring some of the humanity and humility of those exchanges to a wider audience. For a fund focused on listening – what better way than a podcast!
Often the practitioners we are working with are the advocates for youth voice and youth involvement within an organisation. And some may find themselves in a really tricky position of being the people that want this to happen, but also being the people who know how difficult it can be to do it well. We wanted to give greater visibility to some of the tensions and trade-offs involved in listening to young people, and highlight the brilliant work that is already happening.
What we’ve found in the peer learning group is that people can be reassured by knowing that other people and organisations are grappling with similar questions and issues. We hope the podcast will encourage other organisations to share power with young people, and that the learning that is shared will provide some ideas and guidance.
As part of the process we interviewed 23 people from a wide range of organisations. We’ve structured their insights into seven short episodes (between 15 – 30 minutes) which cover: involving young people in designing services and in learning and evaluation, working with young people as trustees and grantmakers, and involving young people by creating structures like youth boards and by creating roles like ambassadors.
We’d like to thank all our guests and we hope you enjoy listening!
Jenny Ross, Collective Discovery, Learning Partner of the Listening Fund.