Promoting young people's resilience, social connection and mental wellbeing

BandMates matched people with a disability or mental health condition to trained community volunteers to attend a live music show at venues and festivals across Victoria, placing previously inaccessible experiences within reach. ConnectMates builds on this model to provide multiple opportunities for young people to increase social connection and wellbeing through a range of activities.

The Young Women’s Leadership program provides a structured approach to increasing young women’s skills, confidence and leadership opportunities in a peer-learning environment. The Program aims to engage young women from migrant and refugee backgrounds as a priority. 

We Know Your Name But Not Your Story engages and equips young people to develop digital and media stories about connecting with their community. Knowing, appreciating and understanding someone else’s story has helped to support stronger community connectivity and increased the likelihood of making meaningful social connections.

The Safe and Supported program aims to build the resilience and social connections of young LGBTIQA+ people and raise awareness in organisations to reduce the abuse, discrimination, bullying and isolation experienced by LGBTIQA+ young people. It does so through the delivery of a range of initiatives and by engaging young people to guide them.

Portable kicked off the Bright Futures project with two discovery workshops attended by Integration Mentors, staff from local councils which had implemented the Bright Futures projects chosen for rollout. 

The workshops focused on drawing out insights from the Integration Mentors that could inform how to support the replication and sustainability of programs. Portable ran a session called ‘Anecdote Circles’, which uses the dynamic nature of a group of people to build narratives around a theme. This allowed us to surface challenges and opportunities, which were then used for further sensemaking activities internally. Insights from this exercise were then used to inform the integration strategy.

We then ran a workshop at the official launch of the Bright Futures Community of Practice. The purpose of this event was to bring all of the Bright Futures host and mentor councils together to start the work of integration. We used a ‘Community Canvas’ as a framework to allow the group to discuss the ways in which they wanted to work together as a Community of Practice. An ‘Identity’ canvas allowed us to explore the purpose, values and success definition of the group. The ‘Experience’ canvas prompted discussions around content, rituals and roles, while the ‘Structure’ canvas prompted the group to discuss preferred channels and platforms for a digital Community of Practice.

We then facilitated face-to-face Community of Practice events bi-monthly for the year-long duration of the project. The Community of Practice was an ideal forum to provide expertise and hands-on facilitation to support all local councils engaged in the Bright Futures integration phase. This network enabled the building of capabilities, the exchange of skills and sharing of practical resources to facilitate the achievement of program replication and sustainability.

The Community of Practice was the key mechanism to support partnerships across all the councils involved in the Challenge.

Each Community of Practice event focused around themes chosen by Integration Hosts and Mentors at the launch event. Some of the themes included youth engagement, co-design and sustainability of programs.

With the onset of the global pandemic, VicHealth understood that protecting health and wellbeing was more important than ever. Whilst the pandemic affected all Victorians, research conducted by VicHealth showed that 4 in 10 young people aged 18 to 24 found it hard or very hard to stay connected with family and friends during the pandemic – significantly more than the average for all Victorians (3 in 10)*.

It was for this reason that VicHealth initiated a change to project deliverables to maximise outcomes, requesting the co-design of project handbooks to be written in partnership with councils. We had initially been working towards publishing a documented Integration Model; however, it was recognised that given the current context, a program handbook for each of the phase three programs would have a greater impact. The handbooks would build on the original Program Implementation Guides written by the Mentor Councils and would include insights and learnings from the Mentor Councils. It was envisaged that the creation of handbooks could support the wider adoption and sustainability of programs into new local government areas to create better mental health and wellbeing outcomes for more young people. The handbooks are now embedded into VicHealth’s partnership activity with local councils to advance social connection and mental wellbeing. The creation of handbooks was a collaborative process between VicHealth and Portable. VicHealth generated the content in partnerships with the councils and with assistance from Portable through a series of workshops.

• The initial focus of Portable’s engagement was on the successful integration and transfer of knowledge from Integration Mentors to Integration Hosts. We did this by creating the frameworks and conditions for this to happen. The face-to-face and online Community of Practice allowed relationships to develop and ideas to be exchanged between hosts and mentors. 
  
• All stage three integration programs engaged young people in their local areas through direct participation and community strengthening, with qualitative data suggesting improved resilience, social connection and mental wellbeing for most young people involved.
  
• In collaboration, Portable and VicHealth wrote a handbook for each of the four programs in the Bright Futures integration phase to further enable replication in new Victorian local councils. These handbooks articulated the capabilities and resources required to establish and sustain successful programs and will live on beyond this program for local councils to use in the future should they wish to implement any of the Bright Futures programs.

VicHealth Local Government Partnerships

VicHealth Bright Futures for Young Victorians Challenge