To bring the voices of care experienced young people aged 16-21 years together with 14 Plus Staff to raise awareness of the accommodation needs of care leavers in SHSCT and to change housing providers’ perceptions of who care leavers are and how tenancy ready they are.
The 14+ Service User Group were tasked to create a short video for the Local Planning Partnership meeting. To support the young people and staff in their understanding and ensure the voices of the young people are central to decision making.
During the first few months, the 14+ Service User Group discussed what messages they would like to get across in the video; personal stories, information and statistics on homelessness among young people leaving care, and also highlighting the stigma that is often attached to young people leaving care. The young people wanted to show that they can be good neighbours, they can hold tenancies, and they are functioning members of society. Once key messaging was agreed, the young people met with a videographer to discuss and plan how this would best be captured within the video. Filming took place and the videographer presented a “first draft” to the young people who were given the opportunity to suggest changes. The process was repeated a number of times until the young people with happy with the final video.
The video was first shown by the young people at the Local Planning Partnership meeting and following this, partners around the table felt that each of their organisations needed to see it. The video has made its way to NI Housing Executive, the First and Deputy First Ministers, Youth Justice, and Housing Rights, to name a few.
Since the video was first shown at the Local Planning Partnership meeting, more young people have been offered housing accommodation options in the last 6 months than in the last 10 years.
The young people who worked on this video have really broken-down barriers:
- NI Housing Executive asked the young people to go around each of their local offices to share the video as a training tool for all their staff
- Runners-up at the UK-wide National Care Leavers Benchmarking Forum
- Invited to meet with First and Deputy First Ministers – this was a significant meeting as a commitment was made to support the NI Housing Executive to ringfence 60-80 accommodations across the region for Care Experienced Young People.
- Winners of the Social Action Champion Award at the VOYPIC Care Day Awards
The key thing in this piece of work was that it wasn’t the staff who did this video. This video was created by the young people from the 14+ Service User Group who were empowered to tell their own stories and that is really where the power of this work came from.
This was a great example of embedding the voice of hard-to-reach groups and was also used in the UI team link and learn sessions, to share good practie and raise profile of involvement activity.
