A Workbook for Designing Responsible Youth Participation - Developed for the NextGenData
While supporting The Data Tank’s NextGenData initiative, which focuses on pioneering a new approach to youth engagement in data and service provision, the Data for Children Collaborative has adapted some of its Responsible Innovation framework suite of tools to build a Workbook for Designing Responsible Youth Participation. This bespoke tool was designed to increase the project partner’s confidence in the ethical delivery of the youth assemblies and the overall approach.
Designing Youth Participation in a responsible way is part of our duty in realising the Convention of the Rights of the Child. It is important that any and all engagement carried out with children and young people is both meaningful and valuable - for the organisations carrying out the engagement activity and the young people themselves – but also reflects on ethical considerations.
This workbook has been designed to support organisations in designing of their youth participation activities to take into account ethical considerations, assess and mitigate risks, and create thoughtful and successful engagement activity, and thereby give sound validity to the findings from the engagement.
This Workbook is a guide to good practice. It is recommended that this workbook is completed by the submitting team through broad discussion, as the questions are written with prompts for reflection.
This does not replace existing ethics practices within your institution, but supports you in formation of your youth assembly design before then going through your own standard ethics processes and practices.
We recommend continual ethical reflection throughout the lifecycle of delivery – this is not a tick box exercise, but a way to continually reflect on and improve delivery.
