How Platfform’s Power Up project took a collaborative, young people-led approach to creating a place away from online toxicity, where fears and hopes could be shared.

Over the past year, Power Up has been delivering a wellbeing service for people ages 10-25 in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan. The service – a mixture of social action, group wellbeing sessions and one-to-one coaching with trauma informed wellbeing practitioners – spent a year engaging with over 700 young people to learn what they’d change in the world, what support they needed, what was lacking, and what they liked. The research, as well as the opinions of the project’s advisory board of young people, informed how our delivery was undertaken.

Toxic spaces, and how we reached out across the ‘connection void’

Social media cast a shadow over our findings. Though rarely mentioned by name, children and young people listed their concerns about the world by citing body image, war, intolerance and discrimination; the youngest children we engaged with said that they’d like to change the world by ‘stopping Putin’ and, in the same breath, by putting a trampoline in their back garden. In our current climate, children know far more about the world at increasingly younger ages, and perhaps as a result many we meet self-report increasing anxiety about the future. Both online and offline, there are fewer places for children and young people to escape from – or healthily process – things they do not have the tools to understand.

During our development year Power Up introduced a pitch-based competition wherein young people could create their own wellbeing service for the chance to have their ideas adopted upon delivery. Two of the finalist groups organically came up with online communities, a safe place for young people to meet others of similar age to learn and bond. This harkened back to the 2010s boom of mass multiplayer games, a surge that occurred in tandem with funding cuts for ‘third spaces’ like youth clubs and community centres. Child-focused websites aimed to introduce secure environments for young people to interact with the internet and one another. As these websites’ player bases dwindled and their software became archaic these highly moderated sections of a less homogenised internet were shut down – and in their absence, children flocked to less regulated websites, filled with hateful rhetoric and disinformation, that filled the void but not the need.

“[I can] talk about things without being embarrassed”

In delivery, Power Up has worked with young people by providing these safe spaces to connect and process together. In schools and community groups we deliver tailored wellbeing sessions that promote mindfulness and relationship building; in one-to-ones our practitioners give a platform for young people to discuss all their worries, big or small, and coach them through these feelings. Young people have fed back that they were glad to be able to ‘talk about things without being embarrassed’ and say the things that they have ‘hold in side [sic] for so long’.

Our delivery stands in line with our research, co-produced with our advisory board, which found that young people wanted to see support that allowed them the autonomy to make their own decisions about support, validation in their individual feelings and experiences, and accessibility in services. Few young people we asked were able to name organisations they could (or would) seek support from; many in the Vale of Glamorgan particularly mentioned the lack of services close to them. Some young people reported being turned away from an overstretched CAMHS and other mental health services in absence of crisis, and we see the impact of this as an early help service that increasingly receives referrals for young people who need intensive, long-form support that is not possible or appropriate for us to provide. Young people in vulnerable groups specifically reported wanting to see support from people who looked like them or had lived experience similar to their own, as they wanted to feel understood.

It’s work that has to be done together

Our greatest successes can be attributed to the fostering of connection, in our project and beyond. The Hangout – a partnership between Platfform and CAVUHB that provides wellbeing support and connection opportunities to 11-18 year olds – has seen success for its integrative approach to relational wellbeing support, and informs our understanding as a project that the best way to overcome barriers is by working together, with young people, local politicians and organisations, to assist in creating supportive environments to seek help for wellbeing at any place, stage or age.

For more information about Power Up, contact powerup@platfform.org

This article also appears in the Winter 2024 edition of Children in Wales’ online magazine, alongside a wealth of other thought-provoking content – you can read that edition here.