Young Women As Experts
Senior Young Women and Girls Practitioner - Systems Change
Our Systems Change Experts (SCEs) were asked one question: If services were working well with young women and girls what would you be pleased to notice? This is very much a solution focused way of asking questions. It's asking young women to imagine a future or outcome, and describe it.
How would they know? What would they notice that would tell them that things were as they needed to be? This is such a useful way to generate expertise, ideas and opinion - and gives professionals an incredibly clear understanding of what young women say will work for them.
Their answer came back as a collection of collages - rich in detail and rooted in their own expertise.
What could a solution-focused approach feel like for young women?
As part of our systems change work, the Systems Change Experts got together to reflect on these questions:
What does solution-focused mean to you?
If services worked in a more solution-focused way, how might young women and girls experience them differently?
If services were working well with young women and girls what would they be pleased to notice?
The SCEs found they could better interact with the question by focusing on defining a good service by how it would make a young woman feel, rather than what that service would do. They creatively explored what services working well with young women and girls could feel like through collages that spoke to care, participation, respect, celebration, freedom and joy, with words including “seen,” “empowered,” “light” and “free.”
At the heart of their reflections was a shift away from seeing young women through problems and deficits, towards recognising them as experts in their own lives. The SCEs imagined services where young women’s experiences are captured accurately, their strengths recognised and celebrated, and where they have the time, resources and access they need. They imagined what this could mean emotionally too: feeling seen, loved, empowered to participate in their care, free to express themselves and able to feel that “life is worth living.”
This is where solution-focused thinking connects to systems change. Changing what professionals notice, the questions they ask and whose expertise they value can change not only an individual interaction, but how a service understands and responds to young women.
As one SCE put it simply: “Young women as experts.”
The workshop highlighted that solution-focused approaches invite people to notice what is possible, imagine new responses and build services where young women can contribute to shape their own lives.
