On the 3rd July 2024, the Youth Engage Community of Practice facilitated a Youth Adult Partnership (YAP) Openhouse session for both youth and adult partners across Power to You(th), RHRN2 and Generation G. During this session, we deep-dived into the challenges we face in YAPs and how we can strengthen them in our work. 

But first of all, what are Youth Adult Partnership? And why are they important in our work?

YAPs are…

working partnerships in which both young people and adults are equally involved and share power. Their voices are equally heard and define the aims of the activity and program together. Decision-making power for young people is slightly less present than in youth-led initiatives because they share it with adults. A YAP involves mutual learning as adults can strengthen the capacity of young people and vice versa.

Above is the Graph of Participation, which represents the different elements necessary for meaningful and inclusive youth participation, and the varying degrees to which they are present in a YAP.

As in any partnership, trust is a critical element to the success of that relationship. Therefore, in order to maintain and strengthen the relationship between youth and adult partners, we also need to build that trust, and avoid things that risk killing trust. 

Overcoming YAP challenges

With 40 participants from different ages, countries and programmes together in one (virtual) room, there was a host of expertise, experience and knowledge to learn from and share. Therefore, the participants were broken up into breakout rooms, where each participant shared one YAP-related challenge they are facing in their work. Using a method called Troika Consulting, the rest of the participants in the room took on the role of Consultants. They listened to the participants challenge, and asked follow up questions to better understand the situation. Then, the Consultants would begin to discuss this specific scenario, offering advice and suggestions on how they think the challenge could be resolved or alleviated, which were documented on a Jamboard. After 5 minutes of discussion, the group then moved onto another participants challenge, and the exercise continued. This engaging and interactive method of Troika Consulting encouraged mutual capacity strengthening and linking and learning between the participants, whether they were young people or adults. Back in plenary, participants shared the main takeaways from their breakout rooms and the key advice they would be taking forward in their role. 

From this session, Keeke Art developed amazing visual notes to capture the key learnings both on what are YAPs, what is needed for YAPs to exist and how can we ensure strong relationships between youth and adults in these partnerships. For more information, CHOICE has a comprehensive YAP Toolkit which is available on our CHOICE Resource Hub. Please feel free to check it out, along with our other toolkits and resources. 

In the future, we want to continue this conversation by hosting Hangout Sessions on the Mighty Networks with participants who attended the session to hear how they are taking forward the learnings from the Openhouse. Stay tuned for more information!