Child-led campaign

Description

A design thinking process with Child Advisory Team (CAT) to facilitate development of a campaign concept, messages, and assets targeting decision makers (e.g., politicians) and administrators

Date
List people or organisations involved in producing the resource

International Institute for Child Rights and Development (IICRD); CP4Europe Children's Advisory Team

Purpose
Building Participatory Environments
Collective Participation
Age range of target people
13-15 years
16-18 years
19-25 years
Characteristics of children and groups
Not specified
Preparation

Our aim was to work with children to cocreate a campaign about children's participation. 

To get started, IICRD conducted interviews with the five country partners in March 2022. These included members of civil society organizations as well as government employees. These interviews showed that there are particular opportunities, blocks and challenges to children’s participation, experienced by adults working in the interests of children and young people.  We learned about the need to: 

  1. Create space for children and young people to reach out to those with power and influence; 

  2. motivate decision makers to work with children and young people in their processes; and 

  3. Educate decision-makers on children and young people’s right to participate.

With the support of partner organizations, members of the Children's Advisory Team were invited to take part in cocreating an campaign related to these isseues. CAT were recruited. These children then participated in international online design sessions. National organisations worked with these children to support them to take part and to facilitate assignments and consultations between sessions.

Process

Through a facilitated design thinking process, the CAT developed the campaign concept. 

Five online design sessions took place to enable children to be involved in concrete development of campaign messages and related assets. 

The CAT produced the following messages: (1) Embrace your imagination and engage interactively. It’s okay to be silly; (2) It’s okay to tell me, ‘I don’t know.’ You are still you, and I like you! (3) When you embrace your whoops and aha moments, we feel safe with you; and (4) We can work together to solve problems.

For dissemination of the messages, the CAT generated (1) short animations, (2) vignettes in the form of a 4-panel comic strip (for social media and/or as a printable poster), (3) single-frame social media panels, and (4) tangible, take-away trinkets.

Next Steps

The campaign is ready to use. We do not yet know what the results will be.

Modes of participation
Consultative
Collaborative
Child-led
Skills trained
Campaigning
Communication
Countries this was based/targetted
Portugal
Profile of target group
Children and young people
Youth Workers
Municipality Staff
Local Authorities (Policy-makers; Decision-makers)
National Authorities
Donors
Type of resource
electronic publication (PDF)
Target group's degree of knowledge
Beginner