How PR can work with charity youth advisory boards
Any youth charity worth its salt will have a youth advisory board (YAB), a group of young people advising on policy from the perspective of someone born around the time London hosted the Olympics.
How do PRs work with young members as enthusiastic champions of a charity’s work and its relevance to their lives while protecting them as spokespeople?
At Cause we relish meeting with YABs, whether from Mission44, OnSide or our former client, Jamie’s Farm. These young people are nearly always enthusiastic, hilarious and full of ideas.
This was exactly the case when we spent a Saturday afternoon with OnSide’s youth advisory board at the national charity’s Wigan Youth Zone.
The older members have been in post for a year. In those 12 months we were privileged to get to know them and create a wide range of media opportunities, including their unforgettable Big Issue takeover and BBC and LBC interviews.
Wigan was a chance to catch up. Over crisps and sandwiches they told us about giving talks in Dublin, meeting government ministers, helping open Grimsby and Barnsley Youth Zones, and speaking to potential funders. Not a bad first year.
We also got to meet five new recruits, the youngest was born 20 minutes from where the Olympic stadium was being built back in 2011.
It’s crucial for PRs to understand what YABers, as they call themselves, are happy to do in terms of media, what they can speak passionately about and which jourmalists can be trusted with their stories. Matching their personality and confidence levels to the right media outlets is important. Not everyone’s going to be up for a live interview on BBC Radio 5’s drive show, they might be more suited to a phone chat with a print or digital journalist or coming up with ideas behind the scenes while their peers are in front of cameras.
The first step was to talk with the young people one to one to understand their passions. The younger members spoke honestly about their lives, bringing up subjects like housing, anxiety in teenagers, school refusal, being young carers and the incredible role youth workers had played in their lives.
The second step was to pay close attention to how they reacted to a media training session with specialists Media Cubs. In any group of young people there will be media superstars, the ones who are natural in front of a camera, delivering key messages. This immersive session brought out the best in the shyer teenagers, who, by the end of the training, had adjusted their body language, raised their voices and honed their interview answers.
Helping these incredible young people tell their stories and amplify the value of OnSide’s work, is what drives us. But this always has to be in the context of our duty of care to the YAB.
If Alice spoke about her experience of homelessness, would it impact her later life to have that in print? Not if we chose trusted journalists to work with, in this case the team at Big Issue.
Would Chloe’s experience of years out of school affect her future employment chances? Not when she explains so clearly why it happened and how being a member of a Youth Zone has helped her overcome barriers to thrive. In the end, Chloe described her reasons for being out of school so well that she completely changed the view of her LBC interviewer.
We left this funny and imaginative bunch still in the Youth Zone filming social media posts. Everyone contributing ideas, everyone having a say, everyone in hysterics. Exactly how it should be.
(PS: Thanks for the pic of our collab in Wigan, Media Cubs)