The objectives of the protocol are to support individual and organizational capacities to safeguard the mental health and psychosocial well-being (MHPS well-being) of young people in participation processes and to ensure young people’s meaningful participation across programming, research, advocacy and communications.
This protocol provides practical steps, principles, and resources to safeguard young people’s MHPS well-being in the context of participation and engagement. The protocol takes users through a series of Stepping Stones, as follows:
Stepping Stone 1: Self-Reflect provides activities to help individuals become more aware of power relations, assumptions and biases concerning young people, mental health and diversity. This self-reflection can help overcome barriers to inclusive, safe and meaningful participation of young people.
Stepping Stone 2: Assess Resources and Capacities provides a checklist with guiding questions for users to reflect upon and assess whether sufficient time and resources (human resource capacity and budgets) are allocated to support safe and meaningful participation of young people – and how to proceed if not.
Stepping Stone 3: Identify Risks, Harms and Benefits of Participation offers guiding questions, a risk assessment format, and links to an interactive activity for use with young people to identify and assess risks, harms and benefits to young people’s MHPS well-being arising from participation opportunities.
Stepping Stone 4: Mitigate Risks and Harms and Strengthen Support Systems provides guiding questions, ideas for risk mitigation actions, and links to an interactive activity with young people to plan actions that mitigate risks or harms and strengthen support systems enhancing safe participation of young people. This step also includes checklists to ensure sufficient capacity and preparations to support and sensitively respond to young people in distress and other high-risk scenarios.
Stepping Stone 5: Follow Up and Monitor Outcomes provides checklists and tools to ensure monitoring of intended and unintended outcomes of participation on young people’s MHPS well-being and follow-up with young people to increase accountable participation.
The protocol also contains a Collaboration Stepping Stone section, which provides a checklist of actions to create an enabling environment for young people. Staff can use this Collaboration Stepping Stone at any point, whenever young people are brought into the participatory initiative.