Improving collaboration with young people to make progress.
The We Trust You(th) Campaign is an example of how organised and powerful youth-led civil society can be in restoring power to youth in development. Co-led by five youth-led organisations including CHOICE for Youth & Sexuality, Copper Rose Zambia, Green Girls Platform and ¿Y Yo Por Qué No? (YYPN), the initiative challenges partners and donors to commit to building equitable partnerships with young people.
Restless Development has always put youth voice and decision-making at the center of our work. We also know that there are deep inequalities that exist in the human rights and development field and are fully committed to shifting these power dynamics for a more just and equitable future.
We are excited to announce that we have “accepted the challenge” and signed on as commitments makers for the We Trust Youth campaign, to push ourselves as allies and continue to influence others.
This initiative is ambitious and requires real action. We have set the following goals to report against by June 2022.
How We Fund.
- Restless Development will launch and start to operationalise our new Global Resourcing Strategy in which we commit to 20% of the partnerships we form to restore power to young leaders (as per our internal definition and criteria) and 10% of all relevant grants to be redistributed to youth civil society as flexible funding.
How We Partner.
- Restless Development will improve the way we rightfully compensate the young people that we partner with in a way that is proportionate to their time, role and expertise within our initiatives by developing an internal framework with clear standards by June 2022.
- We will finalise and launch a set of Youth Power Principles which will shape our partnership agreements and how we expect our partners to work with young people in our networks.
- We will ensure that youth civil society partners are represented in donor meetings as experts where possible.
- We will influence donors to change their policies and practises to fund youth civil society organisations directly where possible (and in turn, better define our role rather than becoming permanent intermediaries).
How We Develop Programs.
- Restless Development has committed to continuing to have young staff be part of the Restless Leadership Team and have young trustees on all of our national boards. We will continue to implement and evaluate this approach to youth governance to ensure young people have meaningful decision-making power within our agency.
- We commit to working with youth civil society organisations that we have a strong relationship with to co-create / design concepts and projects collaboratively and then jointly seek funding for them.
We at Restless Development are committed to improving our practice of youth centered development. We look forward to reporting back on progress that we have made on these commitments by June, 2022.
