Project End Date: January 2026

We are collaborating with Northumbria University to explore the potential for creative, accessible and inclusive storytelling methods to support seldom heard young people with long-term conditions to share their lived experiences and aid them in communicating their needs to healthcare providers. Our team of peer researchers have facilitated three workshops exploring various storytelling methods with seldom heard young people with long-term conditions across the North East. The findings from these workshops will support future developments of creative storytelling methods to support young people with long-term conditions to communicate their needs. 

Project End Date: September 2025

The Peer Action Collective (PAC) is a £11.4 million programme, which aims to give young people the chance to make their communities safer, fairer places to live. It is funded by the Youth Endowment Fund, the #iwill Fund (a joint investment between the National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport) and the Co-op Group. We were one of 7 areas working on PAC. We covered the North East with one team in Middlesbrough at Youth Focus North East and the other in Gateshead at NE Youth.

PAC is a youth-led project, where young people, employed as peer researchers, social action

leads and changemakers, research the root causes of serious youth violence and transform their findings into social action projects – creating safer and fairer communities where young people can thrive and flourish.Collectively our team of young people interviewed over 150 young people, and transformed their findings into meaningful social action outputs, engaging with over 600 young people in total. Our social action outputs centred around our key findings, addressing the inconsistencies in Delivery of informal education, Understanding of young people’s needs, Relationships with trusted adults, Support services available to young people. To address these inconsistencies our team of peer researchers and social action leads created a youth voice toolkit, PSHE framework, delivery guide and workbook, and Q-cards with local support services for young people who are struggling.

Project End Date: March 2026

The Northern Youth Research Partnership is an NIHR funded project across the North East and North Cumbria, which aims to give young people the opportunity to share their thoughts on what topics health and social care research should focus on to better serve young people. This partnership is youth-led and is centred around youth voice, with the aim of empowering key stakeholders and decision makers to embed youth voice throughout health and social care policy, practice and research. As a delivery partner we support our group of young people in leading conversations with other young people across the North East on health and social care research and practice, analysing the data collected, and sharing their findings with key stakeholders and decision makers to drive youth led change forward. 

We have also been given the opportunity to evaluate the partnership, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, to ensure the partnership is youth-led, accessible, inclusive and diverse; providing a platform for minority and marginalised young people to have their voices heard.