Ensuring youth voices were at the forefront of shaping municipal policies and programs
Challenge: The Municipality was increasing its focus on the engagement of young people in response to increasing rates of youth violence. However, the efforts were often undertaken without awareness of existing efforts of grassroots organizations, leading often to redundancies, institutional resistance, and gaps.
Response: partnered with the Mayor’s Office of the Halifax Regional Municipality to host two interactive, large scale, youth-led consultation sessions that identified key themes for city-community collaboration and facilitated network mapping and partnership building to guide effective project implementation.
My Role: initiating and guiding event design and delivery, facilitating pre and post communications with diverse community stakeholders, recruiting team of support facilitators, acting as primary event facilitator alongside Mayor Kelly
Results:
- engaged 150+ youth, HRM staff, and community members in consensus building process
- identified five themes to guide priorities of revamped HRM Youth Council and of partner organizations
- coordinated follow-up visits from the Mayor to a variety of youth-based organizations to enable follow through