Youth Voices Workshop – a First Step in Justice Design

Categories: Access to Justice, Empathy, Innovation, User Centred

The Lab is moving ahead with the “Youth Voices Initiative“.  The purpose of the initiative is to support the well-being of youth whose families experienced separation and divorce. Research shows that the divorce process can be very damaging for children as their well-being is closely linked to the level of conflict between their parents and other factors. Working with Open Road Communications, local experts in service design, we are using a systemic human-centred design approach putting families and children at the centre which starts from the ground up with a series of design workshops to develop prototypes to change the system to preserve and improve youth well-being.

This process starts with a narrative workshop of young people aged 19 – 26 to better understand the emotional, informational, and legal needs of youth during separation and divorce from youth themselves, in their own words. Unlike previous reform efforts, we need to start by hearing the voices of family members, and children in particular, in order to diagnose the problem, design effective solutions and then rigorously user-test those solutions before scaling up. We will be using developmental evaluation to capture key learnings and incorporate them along the way.

We are grateful for the support of the Vancouver Foundation for this important work.

The narrative workshop will be held in Vancouver on January 22, 2017.  It will be a great opportunity for young adults to add their voices to the access to justice movement in BC, to meet others with similar experiences and to help to make the system work better for children in the future. We are looking for young adults (19-26) who experienced their parents’ divorce when they were younger. The workshop will be professionally facilitated and interactive.  We are offering incentives for participants :).  More information is available here.

We would really appreciate it if you could share this post with anyone you believe could contribute to this important dialogue.  Thank you!

Kari D. Boyle, Coordinator