Transitioning out of youth involvement roles: an interview with a Youth Involvement Officer and Senior Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead

Within mental health research and service delivery, involvement of experts by experience has become increasingly common. The involvement of experts by experience allows for the design and delivery of research that is of higher quality and more rigorous.

Transitioning out of youth-focussed lived experience groups is a matter that is not well understood and, for many reasons, complex. It can be difficult to transition from the role of being a young contributor to research into a professional in the Public and Patient Involvement space. Working in lived experience roles, either as ‘lived experience practitioners’, ‘peer support workers’, ‘PPI facilitators’ or ‘involvement officers’ can be complex and the relationships you hold in these spaces vary depending on your positioning within either the group or the organisation (Carr, 2019).

In this blog we explore the experience of Beckye, a former Youth Advisory Group (YAG) member for the University of Birmingham’s Institute for Mental Health as she begins the making this transition into an employee in a Youth Involvement Officer. The blog takes the form of responses to an with Beckye (Youth Involvement Officer) and Niyah (Senior Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement Lead). The interview offers early reflections that may be of use to organisations or individuals who may be supporting folk undertaking these transitions or in the process of negotiating the transition themselves.

In Anti-Poverty Week here are 5 big ideas for Australia to halve child poverty by 2030

This year, Anti-Poverty Week @AntiPovertyWeek (16-22 October 2022) is calling on Australia to legislate a plan to halve child poverty by 2030 to meet our commitments to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Here, Life Course Centre @lifecourseAust researchers present 5 big ideas to help make this happen.

Womens Policy Action TankLife Course Centre20 October 2022Children, Poverty, policy problem, Policy Research

How to build and maintain trust at the interface of policy and research, insights from a century of boundary spanning

Trust is often invoked as a key ingredient to establishing effective relationships between researchers, their research, and policymakers. In this post, Christopher Cvitanovic and Rebecca Shellock discuss their research on trust in practice. Drawing on their study into ICES (the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas), they outline lessons and processes in building and maintaining trust informed by the organisation’s extensive experience of connecting research to policy.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade28 July 2021Policy Research

Closing the book on 2020

As always, before our hard-working moderators and policy whisperers take a year-end break, we are providing you with some summer reading. In today’s blog we summarise our most-read pieces, and also recommend a few pieces that we felt didn’t get the attention they deserve.

Womens Policy Action TankPower to Persuade27 November 2020Policy Research, politics and democracy

How to improve homeless youth resiliency using sports psychology - the SPRINT project

Creating using evidencePower to Persuade28 February 2020young people, housing and homelessness, exclusion, Lived/consumer experience, Policy Research

How do interest groups engage with policymakers? Involvement, Access and Prominence

What’s the difference between involvement, access and prominence for interest groups participating in the policy process? Professor Darren Halpin (@darren_halpin; ANU) and Dr Bert Fraussen (@BertFraussen; Leiden University) think about why some groups seem to make more headway than others when it comes to influencing policy.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade5 February 2020Policy making, Policy Research, community sector

Telling the story of climate change: threat or emergency, and does it matter?

What happens if we classify climate change as a threat, not an emergency? Liz Boulton from the ANU’s Fenner School of Environment and Society explains how military strategy can be combined with new ideas from philosophy to understand climate change as a ‘hyperthreat’ – and describes what that might mean for crafting effective policy solutions. This is the second in the Narration as Regulation series from ANU’s School of Regulation and Global Governance (Regnet)

Innovation, Policy and governance, IssuesPower to Persuade29 October 2019climate change, Policy Research, communication

Countering poisonous stories: an example of sorcery in Papua New Guinea

This blog is the first in a series examining narration and renarration as regulation from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (Regnet) at ANU. Here, Miranda Forsyth and Philip Gibbs tell us what we can learn from attempts to curb sorcery accusation related violence in PNG.

How can retailers improve access and outcomes for consumers with cognitive disabilities?

In the wake of reports of service providers' poor conduct towards consumers with cognitive disabilities emerging from the Royal Commission into Banking, the Energy and Water Ombudsman of Victoria and the Essential Services Commission, Dr Yvette Maker and Professor Jeannie Paterson from the University of Melbourne offer two sets of resources here to promote a ‘facilitative’ approach to contracting and consumer transactions for people who have difficulties (or perceived difficulties) with learning, concentrating on, processing, remembering, or communicating information, and/or with decision-making.This piece was originally published by the Consumer Policy Research Centre.

Different problems, same solutions: Using a social determinants of health approach to work cross-disciplinary and cross-sectorally

Bridging the evidence-policy gap is a recognised challenge for researchers and policy makers alike. In today’s blog post Hannah Badland, a Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University, talks about the value of inter-sectoral partnerships to solve complex problems. Using the example of a new global framework, The New Urban Agenda, she discusses how agendas that draw on cross-sectoral collaborations can help advance policy action in complex policy areas such as the social determinants of health.

Have your say about the future of national disability policy

Laura Davy (@LauraKDavy) from the Public Service Research Group, UNSW Canberra, summarises the findings of a review into the implementation of the National Disability Strategy 2010-2020 and urges readers to contribute to the consultation process for a new national disability policy framework which will begin next month.

Policy and governancePower to Persuade28 March 2019Policy making, disability, Policy Research

Urgent action is needed to address financial exclusion

As the 2019 New South Wales State election is fast approaching (March 23, 2019), a policy think tank on financial inclusion has proposed an election platform paper with specific state level concerns and possibilities. Jenni Beetson-Mortimer (@BeetsonJenni) who heads up this coalition – NSW Financial Inclusion Network, is our blog contributor today. Jenni is the CEO of Northern Rivers Community Gateway, a registered not-for-profit which provides welfare and community capacity building programs for disadvantaged individuals and communities across NSW and extending to the Far North Coast, New England and Mid North Coast of the state. Located at the forefront of service provision, Jenni bring her experiences, knowledges and collaborative scholarship to persuade NSW policy makers to act on the issue of financial inclusion.

Creating using evidencePower to Persuade13 February 2019evidence-based policy, Policy Research

Before replacing a carer with a robot, we need to assess the pros and cons

In this article, republished from the Conversation today, Associate Professor Helen Dickson from the Public Service Research Group at UNSW and Dr Catherine Smith from the University of Melbourne discuss their recent research published today by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government. The authors discuss the pros and cons of automation and say that the governments need to carefully plan for the inevitable expansion of new technologies to safeguard vulnerable people.

Innovation, Issues, Policy and governancePower to Persuade9 November 2018Policy Research, innovation, Automation, health

To drive innovation, Australia must boost rather than curb investment in humanities and social science research

During the Senate Estimates on 25th October 2018, Labor Senator for Victoria, Kim Carr, revealed on Twitter that then minister for education and training, Simon Birmingham, rejected 11 funding grants recommended by the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2017 and 2018. The grants, all for funding in the humanities, amounted to a combined total of A$4.2 million, including A$1.4m in discovery grants. The decision has been widely condemned in Australia and overseas as undermining confidence in Australia’s highly competitive and rigorous peer-review system.

In the post below, social science researcher and Power to Persuade moderator, Dr. Brigid Trenerry, summaries key reports in Australia and overseas and reflects on how the recent ministerial veto could harm innovation and technological change, where Australia must boost rather than curb investment in social science and humanities research.

Policy and governance, Issues, InnovationPower to Persuade8 November 2018Policy Research, Research

Investing in a resilient generation

The University of Birmingham (UK) has launched a Policy Commission report calling for increased investment in the prevention of poor mental health. The report comes at a time when half of life-long mental health problems show their first signs by the age of 15, and three quarters by the age of 25, and evidence that the rates of mental health problems amongst young people are increasing. The Commission Report, therefore, identifies childhood and adolescence as a critical opportunity to prevent and promote better mental health. In this post, Karen Newbigging discusses the report and implications from this work.

Access, engagement, then impact: factors affecting decision-makers’ use of research

In this piece, Pauline Zardo uses an analysis of The Conversation Annual Survey to consider what influences policy decision-makers' use of research. Increasing access to research is the key. Pauline's piece was first published on the LSE Impact Blog.

The hidden costs of research assessment exercises: the curious case of Australia

Research assessment exercises provide the government and wider public with assurance of the quality of university research, with the guiding principles being accountability, transparency, and openness. But is there the same accountability and openness when it comes to the public cost of these large-scale exercises?

An innovative approach to policy reform to improve the health of people with disabilities

As the first of its kind internationally, the Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health (CRE-DH) is Australia's new national research centre to improve the health of people with disabilities. The CRE-DH, in collaboration with key stakeholders, will gather the evidence needed to guide social and health policy reform. How will the organisation work? CRE-DH's Celia Green and Zoe Aitken explain.

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