March 15, 2021: While youth engagement is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, adolescent health ‎practitioners and policymakers are often not equipped with the tools and techniques to build meaningful youth engagement into their projects from front to back. But it doesn’t have to be this way!

In March, YLabs led a workshop at the 2021 SAHM Annual Meeting to ‎introduce participants to the principles and practice of youth-driven design for ‎adolescent health programming. 

Recording of the workshop, Design with Youth, for Youth: Using youth-driven design to co-design health ‎programming with young people, coming soon!

Youth-driven design is based on a human-centered ‎design (HCD) methodology adapted to meet the needs of young people and engage them ‎intensively, equitably, and sensitively in the co-design process, including on taboo or ‎stigmatized topics. It is intentionally multidisciplinary in nature and people with diverse ‎backgrounds and experiences are encouraged to attend, especially young people ‎leading change in their communities. In this workshop, our team used real-world case studies with a focus ‎on public health practice to show various ways HCD has been ‎employed in public health products, communications, services, organizational ‎strategies, and business models.

Workshop learning objectives:

• Practice design research methods and apply appropriate frameworks to understand ‎young people's needs in health programming as well as equitably and sensitively engage ‎youth in co-design processes.

• Apply insights to uncover opportunities for interventions to improve young ‎people's health.

• Discuss case studies and examples of how to prototype and refine health innovations ‎with young people.‎

Executive Director Rebecca Hope, MBCHB, MPH, and Senior Behavioral Scientist Shola Olabode-Dada, PhD led this session.