Resources

This article, published in Child & Family Social Work, explores how child protection practitioners in Australia understand children’s participation. The study found differing understandings among practitioners and suggested a number of systemic changes that are needed to support consistent and meaningful participation.

This discussion paper talks about the value of developing a coherent, manageable and principled practice framework for co-constructing the child’s personal life story archive. It also includes considerations around trauma, record-keeping, confidentiality,and information technology. Systems and collaborations are essential to translate this into practice.

In this activity young people are encouraged to fill in the page with words or pictures identifying different points of connection at various levels. This will open up conversations about a young person’s place in the world and encourage them to see themselves as one part of a connected network of support. If a young person doesn’t have strong connections in “Family”, they may be led to see that they do have connections elsewhere – perhaps via a connection to nature, culture, or a particular worker or friend.

This collection of articles and presentations from the International Association for Public Participation provide advice and strategies for engaging the community during COVID-19. It focuses particularly on how to use digital methods of engagement in place of face to face contact, which may be useful for those who are wanting to collect data or conduct interviews during this period, as well as those seeking more general advice on how to maintain safe and connected service delivery.

This OPEN Fact sheet provides you with a useful overview of what we mean by Practice Elements.

An alternative to starting with the question, “What subjects are you good at in school”, recognising that for many disconnected young people this can trigger feelings of inadequacy and frustration. Instead, the activity encourages young people to simply reflect on things they like, not necessarily things they are good at or activities with a strong careers focus or pathway. This helps the young person with the practitioner to open up stories and reflection about favourite things, activities, people, and draw out useful stories and experiences that demonstrate skill, character, connection and competency.

This rapid case study talks about a Family Video Visit Program by VACRO which facilitated a virtual connection between children and their incarcerated mothers. The program relieved children from the stress of visiting a prison and helped maintain the parent-child bond. This supported mothers in their reintegration journey after leaving the prison.

This case study sheds light on a early years program which takes a culturally responsive approach to work with families from refugee and migrant backgrounds. It focuses on building connections and providing confidence to parents to support their children.

This guide from ARACY gives practical guidance on how school communities can design and implement successful parent and family engagement practices. It draws from a wide body of research to provide evidence and examples of how you can make parent and family engagement relevant to your school and community.

A set of easy to use templates that are used to give structure to conversations. These tools provide a practical way to capture information that feeds into care and support planning, as well as to improve understanding, communication and relationships.

Access a range of facilitation tools, journey mapping tools, role playing tips and techniques, voting systems and more, to better manage co-design processes with multiple stakeholders. Created by Iriss and used in Pilotlight, these tools will be relevant to lots of different organisations and situations.

In this OPEN Forum, Mary Ann Notarianni discussed how the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health have developed their thorough 'Quality Standards' for engaging with both young people and with families.

In this presentation, Casey Hepburn and Jenny Fairbairn from the Queen Elizabeth Centre (QEC) discussed their design and implementation of a new Client Engagement Framework. The new Framework focuses on using social media to engage clients and involved three components: QEC Video Stories, a Client Online Panel and a Client Advisory Group.

In this presentation, Casey Howden (Kids First) explores how to bring children to the centre of our work. By using a strengths-based, child-centred approach, children can tell us who they are – and how we can partner with them to achieve positive outcomes. So, who is Casey Jones? Casey Jones is the name of a child’s favourite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and the bridge that enabled practitioners to join with this child and his mother. Casey Jones sparked a positive transition by shifting the focus from what might fail, to what might work.

This document developed by the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental health outlines a number of principles and practices for engaging with families. These were co-developed with a youth advisory group and seek to ensure a high quality of client engagement and service.

This document developed by the Ontario Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health outlines a number of principles and practices for engaging with young people. These were co-developed with a youth advisory group and seek to ensure a high quality of client engagement and service.

This case study sheds a light on the Youth Leadership Program Area at Centre for Multicultural Youth. It talks about principles and values which respect the views and abilities of young people from diverse backgrounds, and has transferable lessons for all kinds of youth participation models.

This 'Who Am I?' workshop report talks about the importance of capturing the perspectives of children and young people who are actively involved in the constructing their record while ‘in care’, and the process of collaboration between them and professionals. The idea was to understand the principles underpinning record-keeping and archival programs; and unpack the factors which enable or create barriers to effective practice for front line workers, managers and organisations providing out of home care.

In this webinar Sarah Bendall (DFFH) gave an overview of the Client voice framework for community services and how it helps to ensure the quality and safety of community services for everybody, every time. This webinar also included a panel of representatives from across community services who are passionate about client voice and will share some practical examples and ideas about how to engage clients well.

This webinar from the Victorian Public Service Evaluation Network 'Lunch and Learn' series featured presentations from Helen Casey (Department of Justice and Community Safety) and Jacqueline Storey and Sharika Jeyakumar (Victoria Legal Aid) speaking about the importance of lived experience and client voice in their evaluation practice, with a focus on family violence as a case study for their reflections. Click the external link to view a video recording of this session, or use the download link to access the presentation slides.

This guide from Youth Power explains how to measure youth engagement, and why this is an important part of working with young people. It also discusses a number of specific indicators of youth engagement, and links to tools that can help you measure these.

This report from the National Disability Insurance Agency describes the findings of a study on participant experiences, including major barriers and enablers to community participation. A mix-methods approach was used with participants, families and carers and frontline staff. Findings are detailed in the report.