Youth Voice as Seen Through UNESCO Youth as Researchers: Case Study Examples

• In Event: Highlighted session: Ensuring youth voice in sustainable development and effective program/policy development: the potential for engagement through the UNESCO Youth as Researchers Program

Proposal

Young people make up a substantial portion of the global population. To exclude them from conversations about present-day concerns and sustainable future directions is not only insulting, it is dangerous. Including youth voice in local and global issues can help to ensure sustainable efforts from the young people involved, excluding them almost guarantees a lack of interest and potentially negative actions from disengaged youth. The UNESCO Youth as Researchers program answers a call to include youth voice in community decisions. The program was established in Ireland and has since been employed in the U.S., Myanmar, Vietnam, and Russia. This paper will share three examples from different countries with different groups of young people.

In Ireland, young people explored issues of mental health in Ballina. Some of their findings revealed that girls and boys surveyed agreed that depression, drug and alcohol abuse, stress, and eating disorders are all mental health concerns, however the genders weighted these concerns differently. Amongst other findings, young researchers analyzed their data and developed recommendations. Recommendations from research, driven by youth can enable young people to add their voice and influence change on things that matter to them.

In the U.S., Youth Researcher groups have participated coming from all socio-economic backgrounds, examining topics such as food sustainability and freedom of speech. This paper highlights a group of young people who decided a as group to examine racial discrimination in policing in their North Philadelphia neighborhood. Participants share that prior to the research they felt unsafe and misunderstood by the police officers on their streets, to address this they decided to survey police officers in their community. Through the process of research this group of young people began to gain empathy for ‘the other’ and furthered their research by surveying their community members as well. Based on their findings, youth now believe that young people and police in the community should communicate more often to assist in increasing positive perceptions about both police officers and community members.

A final setting for youth voice to be heard is in Hanoi, Vietnam. The young people of Hanoi worked with the UNESCO center in the city to establish research questions that are important to them and their futures. These topics include LGBTQI awareness, motivations of sex workers, and living with disabilities all as they pertain to the youth of Vietnam. These topics are to be researched this fall and the data collected will be used to help reform the Youth Law of the country. Youth voice working with policy to ensure a sustainable and invested future for the young people of the country.

In all three settings the same program was administered, with a rigorous training in research methodology, and with youth taking the lead in every aspect from topic selection to data analysis. Each group held a distinctly different demographic, yet each group of young people felt their voice was being heard from their peers, their neighborhoods, and their country. The UNESCO Youth as Researchers program is showing itself to be a powerful tool to increase youth voice and to engage young people in a sustainable future that they are a part of developing.

Authors

• Kaila Thorn, Penn State

• Mark A Brennan, Penn State University / UNESCO

• Patrick Dolan, NUI Galway/UNESCO

• Sean Campbell, Sean Campbell

• Jo Caffery, University of Canberra

• Alan Smith, UNESCO Centre, Ulster Unviersity, Northern Ireland

• John Davis Davis, Uiversity of Strathclyde

• Sebastian Galindo, University of Florida