Life-skills, Leadership and Limitless Potential (LLLP) Introduction

3-day Youth Facilitator training & 12-session life skills and leadership programme for young people who have experienced, or are at risk of experiencing, sexual violence.

Programme designed by Abi Billinghurst

Please contact Kate D’Arcy regarding any questions or feedback you might have: kate.d’arcy@beds.ac.uk LEAP by International Centre is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

The LEAP project Life-skills, Leadership and Limitless Potential (LLLP)Youth Facilitator training and 12-session life skills and leadership programme for young people who have experienced, or are at risk of experiencing, sexual violence.

Introduction

The aim of the LEAP project is to promote participatory practice with children and young people affected by sexual violence. The project is being delivered by four international partners across Europe. We want to strengthen and improve child-centred, rights-based responses for child victims of violence. Our work will initially be developed and piloted by practitioners who work with young people and children in the UK, the Netherlands, Romania and Bulgaria.

This toolkit provides the necessary resources for youth facilitators to deliver together with adult facilitators:

• a 3-day training programme for youth and adult facilitators; and • a 12-session programme on life-skills and leadership for young people who have experienced or are at risk of sexual violence.

Both programmes aim to strengthen participatory practice amongst service providers and increase young people’s participation. We propose that this approach can help reduce levels of sexual violence in Europe.

Process

1. Youth and adult facilitators complete the 3-day training 2. They then co-deliver a selection of the topics covered in the 12-session programme to other young people with support from adult practitioners

A 3-day youth facilitator training doesn’t allow the time for participants to go through the delivery of every session which you select from the 12-session programme. It will be necessary, therefore, to spend additional time with the youth and adult facilitators to ensure that they are familiar with the whole programme and how these individual sessions fit in.

The 3-day training prepares, as much as possible, youth and adult facilitators to practice delivering a selection of the 12 sessions, and addresses the key principles which underpin participation with young people affected by or at risk of sexual violence. An important prerequisite for preparing the groups will be the creation of a safe space, a group agreement and consideration of group dynamics. These are not covered extensively in the three day training, but it is expected that this will be an ongoing theme for discussion.

Important considerations

3-day youth facilitator training:

Youth and adult facilitators should participate in the 3-day training, working alongside each other in a non-hierarchical way, to develop the skills and working relationships to successfully deliver the 12-session programme. This will require mutual ownership and respect of each other’s professional experience and expertise by experience.

The amount of preparation and support required for young people to deliver peer training, such as the 12-session programme, should not be underestimated. Our responsibility to prepare young people for such a task only increases when they themselves may have experienced sexual violence and are delivering peer training to other young people with similar experiences. The potential for emotional distress and re-trauma is always present. TThere is an ethical responsibility to deliver programmes that support young people and do not create risk or increase harm. The 3-day programme is full of activities, but it might be that you cannot cover all of these and need to take longer than suggested on certain activities, depending on the young people you are training.

As part of the Youth Facilitators programme, the group members are asked to ‘buddy up’ and observe each other during their time delivering the 12-session programme. You will need to bear in mind the logistics of completing this task once the 3-day training is over and also creating space and time for the buddies to feedback their observations effectively.

Programme pre-requisites

We would expect that anyone delivering these programmes will have gone through and completed a range of preparatory steps in order to create safe spaces and, as much as possible, to prevent harm and risk to young people from occurring or increasing.

These steps should include:

• Your own project mapping to ensure you are clear on the expectations you can set for young people depending on resources and influence. • Introductory sessions for young people and their support workers to allow young people to make informed choices about whether they want to be involved in the projects. • Undertaking risk assessments for all the young people involved to establish the potential for emotional distress; whether they are ‘group work ready’; whether there is conflict external to the group that may play out in the group setting; whether group work will bring them in contact with peers who present risk or harm. It is crucial to understand young people’s views on what issues they may experience and risks they foresee as a result of being involved. • Child protection and disclosures: it is important the group discusses confidentiality and the boundaries regarding this. These will vary dependent on country and service context. Facilitators need to be familiar with their own organisational procedures (this is covered in session 1). • Understanding the support networks in place around the young person to ensure that they have appropriate support in place

should they experience distress or additional needs as a result of the project. • Risk assessing the location for programme delivery: ensuring that you are not exposing young people to risk or heightening anxiety based on geographical location. • Ethical risk mapping: exploring the possible ethical implications for the young person, their families and friends, geographical area and your organisation. This should map the possible ethical implications of the project for these groups both now and in the future. • Information sharing and confidentiality agreements: explaining to young people the boundaries of confidentiality based on your professional and/or statutory duty of care.

Confidentiality

‘Confidentiality’ means that any information shared with someone in trust can only be passed on to someone else with the agreement of the person disclosing it.

Purpose of 12 session programme

The aim of the 12 sessions is to work with young people experiencing or at risk of sexual violence in Europe by providing opportunities to develop projects that strengthen their participation in prevention work.

The content of the 12 sessions will enable youth facilitators to support other young people to think about their own ideas for participation work and how young people can be involved in the efforts to prevent sexual violence. The hope is that the 12 sessions will enable them to develop their own projects to raise awareness and prevent sexual violence. The 12-session programme does focus on the various aspects of creating a safe space and includes:

Creating a safe space; getting to know each other; project mapping; pre- and post-evaluation questionnaire; individual goals and outcome setting

Session 01

Individual distance travelled assessment; human and children’s rights; participation

Session 02

Sexual violence; consent; the importance of young people’s voices

Session 03

Session 04

Life-skills: communication, listening and questioning styles

Session 05

Life-skills: power, assertiveness and conflict resolution

Life-skills: giving and receiving feedback; body language; individual outcome and goal setting; individual distance travelled assessment

Session 06, 07

Life-skills: presenting and debating

Session 08

Preparation for participation projects: the importance of young people’s voices; young people’s experience of sexual violence, the problems and the solutions

Session 09

Preparation for participation projects: measuring change; helpful relationships; representation of young people

Session 11

Ending and evaluation: focus group; put it in the post; individual outcomes and goal setting; individual distance travelled assessment

Session 12

Preparation for participation projects: prioritising themes; vehicles for change; action planning

Session 10

Your use of the programmes

We understand that every service will be working with different children and young people in different contexts. You are expected to take sections of the tools offered here. Delivery of the full programme would be fantastic but we recognise this will take a lot of time and resources. We hope you use it in a way that is useful for you and the young people you work with. We would welcome any feedback that you would like to share with us about the delivery and outcomes of the work.

The important point to remember, as detailed above, is that any meaningful participation work should be done with consideration of the preparatory steps above and with transparency in regard to what young people can expect.