Putting youth empowerment at the heart of our research

It's 11.30pm and I'm currently sat on a train home from airport after having spent the last four days in Litomysl at the World YMCA Strategic Delivery Summit. So what better time to reflect on my experience.

What I believe makes us unique (and excites me most about being part of the movement) is the sheer scale of young people we work with, from all backgrounds and from across the four corners of the earth.

It was this simple recognition at a local level in England and Wales that gave us a reason for starting to undertake research just three years about. Since coming to this seemingly obvious but truly mindset changing realisation at YMCA England we've built our research offer and programme built on the voices of these young people.

For this reason the potential of One Million Voices 2 excites me (as I write that, I am fully aware that sounds very sad, only someone that works in research would get excited by hundreds of managed group discussions!!!). OMV2 will put young people's voices at the heart of the global movement's research for the first time.

But it was listening to Peter Burns (YMCA Victoria) and Johan Vilhelm Eltvik (World YMCA) that challenged me to think how we can go deeper and further with our research, both nationally and globally.

Peter spoke brilliantly about the importance of letting go of control in succeeding. A scary thought, but a necessary action to innovate and grow While Johan spoke at length challenging us how we make youth empowerment more than just a statement and actually about everything we done.

It was with these two thoughts buzzing around my brain (along with some wine and inspiring conversations with Ken), I got to to thinking about how we can do this in my day-to-day work. What does letting go and embracing the concept of youth empowerment practically look like?

I came to the conclusion it was going beyond just gathering young people's voices as we are doing now. Letting go and empowering young people is about them setting the issues we research, designing how this research takes place, presenting not just issues but also their ideas for solutions, and finally getting the research to those that matter (decision makers, influences and other young people) to affect change.

I shared this when talking about where we wanted to be as a global movement in 2044. But coming home today enthused (if a bit tired) made me think why should we wait that long. Why can't this be part of OMV2 and why can't this be part of our research programme for next year?

The answer is there is no reason!