Young people as agents of change: A consent education project

Our co-designers are trained and we’ve got our workshops booked in!

We’re excited to connect with more young people across the Macedon Ranges to help them figure out how to have fulfilling, caring and healthy friendships and relationships.

Through discussion, collage and art, each participant will create their own poster to take home with them. The poster helps them decide what they want in a healthy relationship, the role the law plays in that, and the actions they can take to stand up to unhealthy influences.

We’ll be delivering from May – July before creating more resources!

In January, 4 of our co-designers graduated to be Peer Educators in the YPAC project. Peer Education is where someone who shares something in common with you supports your learning. Research shows us that it’s really effective in relationship education. We’re so excited for our Peer Educators to be such a crucial part of this project!

Between January and April, they were part of some specialised training to develop their skills, knowledge and employability after the project. Together we trained in

• Media Advocacy, thanks to YACVic,
• Healthier Relationships,
• Responding to Disclosures of Sexual Assault,
• Facilitation and Peer Education (including practicing delivering the workshop to each other).

Our Peer Educators absolutely blew us away with what they already know, and we know they’ll deliver the content with care, empathy and confidence!

We’ve been hard at work with one of our co-designers to create a zine (pronounced “zeen”) for workshop participants. This co-designer is an amazing artist and it was great to work on the zine together.

What is a zine you ask? Zines are self-published booklets that have been used in civil rights and feminist movements for decades to share information, stories and create change on topics that mainstream media may not be interested in. There is significant research on the role they play in community building, education and in uplifting marginalised voices.

Our co-designers advocated to include a zine in our project to ensure workshop participants

• had a resource to take home,
• had extra information on topics and supports,
• could expand their knowledge with additional activities.

Each year the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria hosts a regional youth conference. This conference supports anyone who works with young people to learn more about the big issues young people face, how to work more collaboratively with young people and about youth-led solutions.

We spoke on a panel and shared what we’ve been learning about co-design, regional young people’s challenges with consent and much more. We know the perspectives of regional and LGBTQIA+ young people are often missing from conversations about primary prevention. We want to change that!

We learned so much from fellow panellists, MacKillop Family Services, the YACVic and the Man Cave.

The Co-Design team has officially tested the workshop! Overall, the feedback was positive, with a few changes identified to make the workshop more relatable and easier to facilitate. We also looked at accompanying resources, including a Zine, to emphasize key learnings from the workshop.

In late November, we got together on a rainy Sunday. We tested key activities from the workshop, including collaging. The workshop is influenced by

• Art therapy practices, which are evidence-based ways to learn and promote healthy boundary settings,
• Sexual violence primary prevention research, including the drivers of intimate partner violence for LGBTQIA+ people (from Rainbow Health Australia) and violence against women (from Our Watch),
• The Ecological model, which looks at preventing gendered violence across all aspects of society, community and individual factors,
• A Strengths-based model, drawing on the existing strengths and goals of participants.

Womens Health Loddon Mallee hosted a much needed webinar on young people and consent. With about 110 participants, we shared practical ways to support young people with consent and heard from Chanel Contos, a consent advocate, and Will, a Peer Educator from YACVic.

Community-wide collaboration strengthens all of our work, so we were so pleased to collaborate with people across the Loddon Mallee region!

In October, thanks to our partnership with Sunbury Cobaw Community Health, we presented a Consent trivia on a local Pride Camp. Our co-design team were passionate about finding creative and fun ways to talk about consent, and the evidence suggests that many young people learn well when the content is “gamified”. So we created a Trivia, where teams of young people would problem solve questions about consent.

Lot’s of LGBTQIA+ young people we’ve spoken to say their current Relationship and Sexual Health educations doesn’t answer their questions or meets their needs. This is backed up by evidence that tells us that young LGBTQIA+ people experience high rates of feeling unsafe or uncomfortable in educational and workplace settings, high rates of verbal harassment based on sexuality or gender identity (Hill et. al. 2021).

So it was a privilege to support young LGBTQIA+ people to learn more about consent and respectful relationships in a supportive and inclusive space.

We learned a lot through this process, including that young people LOVE talking about consent.