The young people decided what they wanted to do for this project and the adults involved supported their participation. Adopting a Youth Participatory Action Research approach (YPAR) the focus was to build the capacity of fifteen young people in Greece and England, enabling them to identify the issues they faced in relation to unemployment, and to consider helpful strategies to overcome them. They acted as young researchers to further understand the nature of the issues, and were supported to develop a resource that would be useful to other young people, foster carers and practitioners. Finally, young people have been supported to advocate for actions to facilitate change.
The resource begins by supporting everyone to understand the concept of resilience and the benefits of adopting a resilience approach. The approach is brought to life through interactive activities that carers, young people and professionals can use in support of promoting resilience. Through their work, the young people shared stories and role models that had been significant in supporting their own resilience, such as Malcolm X, and such stories are illustrated for the benefit of other young people. The resource details the young people’s pathways through foster care and the resilient moves that have been important in their lives in overcoming barriers to success. The resource also matches these stories to a resilience framework that was previously developed by members of the team to support carers, parents or professionals to understand the practice implications. Carers, professionals and young people can use the resource and the exercises in it to:
- support their understanding of resilience
- transfer this knowledge into practice
- foster a relationship between themselves and a young person through completing the activities, or for young people to support their own resilience.
The book was used in the training of support teachers, over two hundred to date, as part of their vocational training and professional development run by the Greek Ministry of Education’s special education training programme. Many support teachers work with students from foster care and they desperately need resources to help them with these relationships. They have also used the Resilience Framework included in the resource as it contained useful ideas and basic guidelines for supporting those students. These are new resources for the Greek context where support from central government is scarce. The use of the book in training these teachers was evaluated very positively by the teachers involved and many suggested that it be used in the training of other professional groups.
In the UK context, the use of the One Step Forward Book has inspired the project team to develop further resources through the Boingboing social enterprise with grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK. Academics, practitioners and young people have worked in partnership to produce games and other activities relating to resilience. These have all supported vulnerable young people to develop useful skills and to build their own resilience. Three young people with complex needs who were previously unemployed have gained employment with the social enterprise Boingboing to develop and market these resources. Most recently, a funding bid to set up Boingboing Blackpool has been successful. With support from the Big Lottery Fund in England as part of Boingboing Blackpool, further resources and training packages will be developed based on the resource produced in this task and on other resources subsequently innovated. A UK-based philanthropist has also pledged a donation to the cause which will enable further marketing of the tools.
Hence this STYLE task has acted as valuable springboard for the development of further co-produced outputs. It has also already led to the employment of young people with complex needs and looks set to be a springboard for the development of even more social enterprise opportunities for young people with complex needs as well as further research into how to make this happen.