The brief
This campaigning and advocacy organisation had run several small sessions around the impact of the climate emergency on education but wanted to run a larger, more impactful event. The goal of the event would be to work with young people to develop strategies and ideas to influence the influencers on these issues. I was brought in to facilitate and design this process.
We agreed to run a 24-hour sprint that would engage a large number of young people from around the world to join a co-creation process, generating ideas and passing those ideas on to the next group.
The approach
The key aim of the process was to bring together a large number of young participants, so we agreed to run four sessions covering four different time zones across 24 hours. We brought in young leaders from different regions as co-facilitators, and used a digital whiteboard as a place to collate and collect our data.
We moved through several phases, starting with idea generation, then a few sessions focused on developing those ideas before the final phase where we reviewed those ideas.
The challenge
As we were working with young people, it was important to ensure we took adequate steps to implement our safeguarding policy. We used Zoom, but kept cameras switched off, with no personal information shared in the chat.
Many of the challenges were around engaging young people from rural communities, including some who didn’t have English as their first language, and had different levels of experience with terms around the climate crisis. It was important that we defined the question as clearly as possible, and used the translation feature on Zoom to ensure the sessions were as accessible as possible.
The outcome
Across the four sessions, we saw 251 young people join us, representing 34 different countries. We finished the workshop with seven big ideas developed over the 24-hour sprint, which the organisation is continuing to incorporate into its work.