Sarah has just posted a really interesting resource (the Youth Infusion 'Are You Ready for Youth Engagement' Tool) which opens with some of the questions organisations might want to ask themselves before embarking on a yourney of exploring participation.

What struck me is that Sarah's 6 questions (well, there are six bullet points... there are a few more questions in reality...) cover a lot of ground. Here are the question (in bold) and a bit of my own commentary exploring what I think the questions dig into...

1. Why you want to engage youth in your organization? Why now?
   Exploring motivations... we need to know why an organisation wants to engage with young people... Is it because of edict from above? An identification of need? A recognition of a trend? A belief in the right of young people to be involved?

2. How important is youth engagement to meeting your organization’s stated mission and objectives?
   Exploring whether the organisation understands youth engagement as a core activity, or an optional extra. Will support for youth engagement dry up when budgets get tight?

3. What forms of youth participation/youth engagement have been tried in the past? What has worked? What has not worked? Why?
   Exploring the history... what obstacles do you need to be aware of a consultant? What assets and experience already exists in the organisation that could help a process of developing youth engagement.
   

4. How do you envision young people working with your organization? What would
   successful youth engagement look like?
   Exploring expectations, visions and understandings... getting someone to describe their idea of what participation would look like can give really useful insight into how they understand the practise of engaging young people. I'm exploring the use of questions that illicit a narrative response more and more in what I do...
   

5. What do you see as the major barriers to youth engagement within your organization? Are there any legal barriers to youth serving in a governance capacity?
   Exploring possible pit-falls. Being aware of obstacles in advance...
   

6. Who will need to buy-in to the youth engagement concept and plan before it can be
   adopted?
   Exploring challenges and how to overcome them. Mapping out key people in the organisation whose support is needed.

Question 1,3 and 4 seem to me to be quite broad questions, exploring Motivation, Vision and History. To my mind questions 2, 5 and 6 come across a little to narrow for an assessment of readiness for a participation process - being more geared towards mapping some of the particulars of a process of organisational change...

Bringing youth engagement and participation into an organisations mission plan, mapping and overcoming barriers to engagement, challenging and working practical and legal obstacles to young people in governance and gaining the buy in of key staff and partners are all part of the journey into participation. Being aware that these will be stages on the journey is neccessary to be ready for the journey - but I worry a little that these questions could invite obstacles...

I'd be really interested to hear from Sarah how these questions work in practise to launch a participative process. The tool they come in is billed a 'Self Assessment' although I wonder if they might be more practically used in a first interview with a potential client organisation.

Overall however, I think Sarah's questions provide a really interesting starting point...