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The Emotional Wellbeing & Resilience Project aims to address the impact of trauma and childhood adversity.

The vision of the project is to give children and young people the relationships and connections they need to build their resilience and emotional wellbeing by bringing services and community together to address the impacts of childhood adversity and trauma.

The project has a number of aims, including:

• Awareness: developing trauma-informed organisations and communities that recognise the reasons behind behaviours and address this in a positive manner.
• Relationships: Children and young people have the opportunity to experience and maintain trusting, stable and nurturing relationships.
• Resilience: Support for children, young people and their families to build their resilience to help them achieve the best possible outcomes regardless of the difficulties they may face.
• Co-ordination & Research: knowing how services work together effectively and building on research to identify what can be improved for vulnerable children.
• Equity: to ensure fair and consistent access to opportunities for all children, young people and families.

The project is funded by the Shetland Islands Council and is supported by our partners, NHS Shetland, Voluntary Action Shetland (an umbrella organisation for many in Shetland's third sector), Police and relevant services in the Council.

As the project relates to young people, their input was required in the development of the vision, aims and objectives.

The challenge

After securing funding for a project that aimed to address the impact of trauma and childhood adversity, it was important for young people to play an ongoing role in the development of the project. There were a number of challenges to consider, particularly in relation to capacity and commitment within this role. How could we include the voice of young people and who can connect to Shetland’s young people, who have the time to engage and were paid for their work? How many was a good number for a team? How much time would they need? How would we support open, respectful, comfortable, safe engagement with the new project workers and our existing teams of professionals?

Another challenge was around how to guarantee that the young people could maintain an impartial status, whilst also ensuring they received the support they needed to engage in a landscape dominated by professionals. This was innovative as no one had done it as directly.

Outline of activity

The Emotional Wellbeing and Resilience project officers took the decision, following discussion with project governance, to try to find a way to employ a group of young people.  The reasoning behind this idea was that they would become project workers with a remit to participate in a wider group to define the vision, aims and objectives for the project. Then, in the longer term, they would connect with the wider voice of young people in Shetland.

The project created a contract with our local voluntary sector umbrella group (Voluntary Action Shetland) to:

• maintain independence
• provide structure for recruitment and employment
• Provide support to engage in groups
• Provide support to carry out activities
• provide ongoing support.

The objectives of this contract included:

• Identifying and providing local and national training opportunities to enable young people to participate effectively in the decision-making process.
• Identifying the training needs of the strategic group as a whole to enable young people and adults to work together effectively in the decision-making process.
• Providing regular 1-1 and group support for young people.
• Providing on-going support and training to enable young people to participate in full at strategic overview meetings, including planning, preparation, attending and evaluating.
• The young people representing the views of young people from different geographical areas of Shetland and with different social backgrounds. Using the OPEN Project’s existing network of young people, involving other third sector organisations and Shetland Island’s Council services as the project evolves.
• The OPEN Project working in partnership with the Emotional and Wellbeing Project to ensure the participation of young people in the strategic development of the initiative in Shetland. Working to identify gaps in services, seek solutions to design and develop high-quality support services.
• The OPEN Project working in partnership with the Emotional and Wellbeing Project to ensure the participation of young people in the delivery of agreed activities and tasks.

Results

The contract and support have enabled the recruitment and continued engagement of the young project workers. They have been involved in the following actions:

• Participation at Strategic Overview Group meetings, including the development of the project’s vision, aims and objectives.
• Created their own Rich Picture. These Rich Pictures attempt to bring everything together that might be relevant to a complex situation, using pictures, diagrams, etc., as opposed to words, where possible. This allows for feelings, opinions, connections and facts to be discovered.
• Collaborated on the logo.
• Designed and delivered workshops at the Festival of Care 2019, on topics of resilience and where young people hang out.
• Researched and provided content for a support information leaflet for young people during the COVID-19 lockdown.
• Designed and carried out a survey about young people’s understanding and knowledge of services and how to access them.
• Designed and carried out workshops in schools based on the Festival of Care.
• Designed and carried out focus groups to further explore themes identified in earlier activities.

Feedback from the young workers has been positive:

“I enjoy working with our core group, discussing topics, coming up with ideas of improvement but also bringing young people’s views to strategic meetings.”

The project has helped the young workers grow:

The work has felt rewarding:

“Just being able to try and make a difference for young people’s lives.”

“Hoping to make a difference and improve services, create new services.”

Learning

The young workers’ engagement in the Festival of Care and subsequent questionnaires and workshops with the young people of Shetland are particular highlights of the work.  Their willingness to engage in new approaches and improvement techniques continued throughout.

The project was set up with the specific aim to provide services with support and capacity to explore improvements identified by the front line. There was a hope that investigations carried out by young workers could support services with service improvement and design, or indeed that services would request specific investigations. For a variety of reasons, including the COVID-19 pandemic, this has not happened in the way that was anticipated. However, it was felt that services are now prepared to benefit from the completed work. The findings gathered will be available and relevant for an extended period of time.

Furthermore, the scale of the project was difficult to communicate and, consequently, it was challenging to manage expectations around the young workers’ tasks. This is particularly difficult at the beginning of this type of culture change project. There is a lengthy project set-up period, and while the aspiration of including young workers from the beginning was valid, it may not have been the best experience for them. This could be attributed to many phases of culture change not being constant, including interest, engagement and impact. The pandemic also added to the complexity of understanding the progression of such a diverse and complex project. There was initial aspiration regarding engagement in service change and improvement; however, it took a while for this to properly take off. Services are now looking to learn from the data and stories gathered by the project workers.

There are a few challenges that could be addressed for any future situations that aim to include young workers. The employment arrangements may not have been optimal for the project or the workers. This is due to the initial difficulty assessing the amount of time required for the project and when tasks would be delegated. It was understood that the young workers and the supporting organisation was frustrated by the pace at which the project moved. Consequently, it was suggested that more work with services during the first year of the project could have promoted and encouraged the involvement of the young workers in any improvement tasks.

Resources

Rich pictures - to gain a broad understanding of a subject and how people feel.

Systems diagrams - to visually capture and group diverse information.

Model for Improvement – to support small tests of change.

Jane Cluness, Shetland Islands Council
jane.cluness@shetland.gov.uk