Working with stakeholders
An important part of CHANCES-6 is involving representatives from each country involved in the project, from the very beginning.
By engaging stakeholders throughout the project we aim to ensure that our findings are tailored to national contexts and can effectively inform policies, programmes, and future research.
We will involve representatives from governments, universities, and NGOs or other third-sector organisations. This includes stakeholders in Colombia, Brazil, and South Africa from various policy and research backgrounds, including in youth, employment, education, mental health, human rights, and anti-poverty.
We are holding several stakeholder workshops throughout the project to raise awareness of the importance of the topic, and to facilitate dialogue about:
- CHANCES-6 analysis plans and the design of the research
- How current welfare programmes work at the moment, challenges in running them, and opportunities to improve them so that they achieve better outcomes for young people and break the cycle between mental health and poverty
- Findings from CHANCES-6 research, what they mean in particular national contexts, and how they can be used to facilitate change
- Engagement with the global mental health and anti-poverty communities through effective social media and dissemination strategies
Engaging young people
Ultimately, the research seeks to benefit young people living in poverty, and we are therefore involving young people in the research itself.
We use innovative engagement and research strategies to gather the views and experiences of young people with lived experiences of poverty. We want to understand:
• how they experience poverty
• what mental health challenges they face
• which coping and resilience strategies they employ
• how they experience the support they receive and what they find most helpful
Young people are invited to share their stories more widely, for example through films or written narratives. In addition, young people are invited to events about CHANCES-6 where we would like to hear from them about what they think of the project and how the findings might best be used to support them.