The importance of working with young people to co-design sports programs that meet their needs and aspirations is well established. For instance, active and meaningful participation is a cross-cutting principle of the Sport for Protection Toolkit: Programming with Young People in Forced Displacement Settings, a collaboration between the UNHCR, International Olympic Committee and Terre des hommes. Co-design is one of the most promising ways to achieve this.
Some sports program invite young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds to co-create their programs, but it is still quite rare to see young people centrally involved in the research, monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) that underpin the iterative development of such programs. Youth Change Makers emerged as a way to address both the political challenges and inherent power imbalances of conducting research and MEL with young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds. It spanned the entire process: from formulating the purpose, questions and priorities, to collecting and analyzing data, and to communicating findings and recommendations that led to social action and program improvement.
Youth change Makers aimed to create an opportunity for young people to explore issues that affect their communities whilst building content knowledge, research skills, and interpersonal skills.
Youth Change Makers took place in Football Empowerment (FE), a charity organization’s African Australian football program in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. The project comprised a 16-week youth-led participatory action research (YPAR). Participants also included four African Australian young women (second to fifth authors) who were employed as researchers on the project. Loy was a 24-year-old Law and Art student with three years of experience in the football program. Nyayoud was a 26-year-old Criminology and Justice student with professional experience in youth engagement and community engagement. Kashindi was a 20-year-old studying a Bachelor of Applied Sciences with three years of experience in the football program. Adut was a 23-year-old with three years of experience in the program.
The co-design process.
The first seven weeks were designed with the intent of building capacity with the young women. In that phase, Carla had regular collaborative meetings with the young women aimed at training them in conducting YPAR and co-designing the project with them. In the first three weeks, Carla and the young women discussed what YPAR is, what they had learned from FE and ways to listen and respond to young people’s voices. In weeks 4-5, Ramón trained the young women in theories of change and program logic mapping, and facilitated the co-creation of a program logic map with the young women. This collaborative exercise sought to identify the connections between the program’s resources (inputs), activities, outputs, and outcomes, and to explain how they expected activities to contribute to the intended results. Finally, Carla and the young women collaboratively decided on the data collection process and discussed ethical aspects in YPAR (weeks 6-7).
The next nine weeks saw the implementation of the YPAR. A Student-Centered Inquiry as Curriculum approach was used both as a process for working with the participants and as a framework for data collection. This process includes a Building the Foundation phase followed by a four-phase cyclical process of Planning, Responding to Students, Listening to Respond, and Analyzing Responses (Activist Phase) as the basis for all content and pedagogical decisions (Oliver and Oesterreich 2013).
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