Co-Creating Pathways with Young Leaders
This week, one of Play for Progress’ Young Leaders will begin to contribute to our wider community with his first session as a fully fledged member of the Welcome Team!
We feel incredibly lucky that many of the young people we first worked with back in 2017, now in their early 20s, have stuck with Play for Progress over the years, and now support their community of peers as Young Leaders. They meet regularly to provide feedback, run projects and parties, and act as session assistants.
We are keenly aware of the importance of centring the voices of young people with lived experience as we move forward with our next steps as an organisation, and are working to create ways for young peoples’ perspectives to be channeled directly into strategic decision making by our Board.
In doing so, we are seeking to reinforce the place of our young leaders in the team and develop a lived experience mentorship pathway.
We want to do this in a way that is careful, intentional and trauma-informed. Young Leaders will be fully supported with formal supervision with our therapy team as well as informally by the team of artists with whom our young leaders have well established relationships, built up over many years.
In providing mentorship to the younger people who access our services, young leaders will fulfil a critical role as ‘elders’. This is already beginning to occur organically and the establishment of a mentorship programme would strengthen this significantly. In a world where it can be difficult for this group to access older people from their own communities, this provides an anchor in an otherwise uncertain world.
But it’s Play for Progress who will truly benefit from bringing team members with lived experience into more central roles in the organisation by helping us shape the future of the organisation from within the community we serve.
With its focus on Young Leaders pathways, our mentorship programme feeds directly into one of our strategic priorities: “centring leadership of young people with lived experience in organisational governance and decision making” whilst offering practical benefits to both young leaders themselves as well as younger people in need of peer support from elders in their community.
To build on our emerging practice, we are actively looking for:
Funding to roll out training for our Young Leaders Support us — Play for Progress
Trustees with lived experience of displacement or migration to join our Board and help us progress this journey - more info here Work with Us — Play for Progress
Sponsorship for Young Leaders on their mentorship pathway - contact us to find out more about ways to get involved
Commissions from organisations looking to learn from our trauma-informed approaches to working with young people, teams and communities Train with Us — Play for Progress
If you think you might be able to help us, or are interested in finding out more, drop us a line at contact@playforprogress.com.
