Too often, young people are invited to share their voices but not allowed to lead. Now is the time to challenge this narrative head-on, and Youth Insearch Foundation is leading the way.
Youth Insearch helps young people address childhood trauma by creating safe spaces for them to engage with each other, supported by youth peer workers with lived experience and social workers. The organisation serves 41 local government areas – predominantly regional and rural communities – across Queensland, NSW and Victoria.
The weekend workshops are facilitated by social workers and youth peer workers who have gone through leadership training and participated in the program themselves. Part of those workshops are trauma therapy sessions where dialogical practice is used to provide a safe space for young people to talk and discuss the challenges and adverse events they’ve had as children.
“We find that when young people engage with other young people who have experienced similar situations, they rapidly build trust, open up, and start working through those issues and making sense of them,” CEO Stephen Lewin told Third Sector in an exclusive interview.
At the THRIVE National Youth Summit, Mr Lewin will be facilitating a workshop that seeks to explore how to move beyond youth consultation and build a meaningful youth peer workforce across the support sector for young people. We asked him to provide some insights into the session.
What is the transformative impact of youth peer work in diverse systems of care?
What we’ve found at Youth Insearch is that young people with lived experience are best placed to support other young people who have experienced childhood trauma.
Most young people who have experienced childhood trauma – caused by trusted adults, the system, out-of-home care and youth justice – lose trust in adults and don’t often engage with trained adult clinicians one-on-one. A youth peer worker, particularly in group sessions, can reach those young people, engage them and build trust with them quite rapidly because they’ve been there and trained to use their lived experience to give young people the agency, autonomy and hope to be able to create the future they want.
If a young person engages with the peer worker and the peer worker walks alongside the young person, the peer worker can help rebuild their trust in the existing system by sharing positive experiences of engaging with clinicians and services out there. It’s not about creating a system that replaces the current system, but it’s about ensuring that we’re leveraging and making sure that young people who are in need are engaged with the system.
How can we navigate from consultation and advisory roles to sustainable employment pathways for the youth?
We’ve been peer-to-peer and youth-led for 40 years. And it’s interesting to see a lot of movement about engaging young people in their solutions and having a youth voice. However, I see many youth organisations doing a spectrum of youth engagement, speaking to young people, but not using their voices to inform their programming.
At Youth Insearch, we challenge the status quo and acknowledge that there is a latent workforce in regional and rural communities, as well as in metropolitan areas, involving young people with lived experience of childhood trauma, mental health challenges, youth justice and the out-of-home care system. That right there is an opportunity.
That group of young people, for the most part, is likely to be a drain on the social sector system, welfare system, youth justice system and then adult justice system as they grow older. However, if they’re well supported using youth peer working group support, they can address that trauma and then become part of the workforce in their community and leverage their lived experience to help other young people address their childhood trauma and transform their future.
Over the last three years, we’ve stood up a peer workforce of 12 young peer workers who are working at full capacity, engaging with young people in the community who are often not taking any services. We’ve demonstrated that, almost overnight, within 12 months, we were able to stand up that workforce.
When we provide a safe space for young people to work and all the support they need, they can do the work. They can also fill the clinician shortage, particularly in regional and rural areas. For instance, we have a ratio of two peer workers to one clinician. Instead of trying to find more clinicians, we can stand up a peer workforce of young people with lived experience immediately and enable them to work with their peers in their communities.
How can we translate success and failure into lessons from organisations embedding young peer workers?
One of the interesting lessons we learned from advocating for young peer workers is that there’s a stigma about whether young people can do the work and whether it’s safe to let a young person with lived mental health experience out in the wild. We’ve demonstrated that it is absolutely safe and, for the most part, our peer workers are the most resilient and competent staff we have. Some clinicians may have little experience, but we look for young people who can utilise their lived experience and resilience.
We need to create the right conditions for young people to be able to do the work and the right support mechanisms because it’s complex and tricky. There’s this question: “Do you think it’s not a challenge managing young people with lived experience and living experience, as some of those experiences don’t go away?” Many of our staff are young people who have ongoing mental health issues, but by providing the correct safe space, we create the right conditions. As a result, they are the most effective and engaging young people, and that’s what we need to learn as a system.
All our young peer workers (in fact, all people in our organisation), regardless of whether they’re in a lived experience role or not, can have a personal situation plan. It’s a plan that they can share with their support team – might be their colleagues, manager or someone in their personal life. If they need to enact that plan, they can stay at work even if they’re having psychosocial difficulties, and then we all agree on what they do and don’t do during that time. With that, we see young people being able to stay at work longer and bounce back from psychosocial difficulties rather than being detached and disengaged in the workforce.
The other thing that we’ve learned utilising open dialogue is having group supervision. Instead of having individual practice supervision for peer workers, we have group supervision with the social worker and peer teams together to do reflective practice on what they’re working with, what’s coming up for them and how they do their work.
How can we overcome the challenges of stigma, tokenism and resistance from traditional models of care?
That’s a big one because there are things that the entire system needs to challenge and overcome. The mental health system, for instance, needs to look at two hierarchies embedded into it: academic and clinical. Even if we get a new social worker who’s gone through an academic program and the clinical system, it’s very difficult for them to shape that hierarchy and be the expert in the room. While they have accrued their academic and practice knowledge, that cannot replace the power of someone with lived experience.
One of the things we do to challenge the stigma and hierarchy is to value lived experience in our organisation. Once our peer workers are qualified and experienced, by completing the certificate for mental health peer work and intentional peer support, we give them the same salary as a clinician.
A peer worker is always rated less on the industrial tiers than a social worker, but we decided to have them on par to make a statement that they come with just as valuable experience as a clinician. However, people from the medical and clinical system find that challenging because they have built the whole narrative of their career on that hierarchy system.
The other way to reduce the resistance is to start building the peer workforce. For example, when we started placing our peer workers, even if they intrinsically felt less than the clinicians out there in the community, we still embedded them and got them practising and going into the Open Dialogue Foundations Course. The practitioners, psychiatrists and clinicians at that course were blown away by the competence and capability of our peer workers. That demonstration shifts the mindset of resistance to having peer workers.
The other part is keeping in mind that having lived experience alone doesn’t mean someone will be a good peer worker. That can’t be the only caveat. If you only employ someone because they have lived experience but don’t have the right attitude and capabilities, that can cause damage and take the stigma back.
Just like in any position, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got the qualifications. If you’re not the right fit for the role, you shouldn’t be in the role. Be clear about that and make sure that you do your due diligence during recruitment and the first six months. Identify if a person is a good fit and act quickly if you don’t think they are. Don’t sustain people just because they have lived experience if they’ve got other issues that make them unfit for the role.
How can organisations across the care system begin or scale a youth peer workforce model?
Based on the Medicare Mental Health Centres, there’s a focus on adults in terms of having people engaged with the peer worker on entry and exit. But we focus on young lived experience peer workers first, having a ratio of two peer workers to one social worker. That’s when they’re trainees. As we grow and get more experienced and capable peer workers, we could move to a model of four peer workers to one social worker. That’s how to scale the peer workforce.
What should people look forward to in your session?
We’ll have some of our young peer workers, as well as young people from other services, engaged in this conversation, using open dialogue, principles of tolerating uncertainty, and reflection. We’ll engage this peer workforce and start thinking about how we can embed it in all the work we do with young people.
We’ll have them speak so people can hear from their experiences and challenge the status quo, particularly in non-mental health fields where peer work isn’t as embedded. (I’m talking about youth justice, out-of-home care, and alcohol and drugs.) There’s a lot of talk about mentorship, but this goes a bit further than that. We’re talking about a profession and career path, being a peer worker in those fields.
We’re excited to share those thoughts and address some of the challenges that people might have in their organisations and with their funding bodies to help them build their peer workforce across the country.
Don’t miss the chance to join this interactive open dialogue workshop that will bring together youth workers, executives, clinicians, government representatives and peer workers. Secure your spot for THRIVE 2025 here.
Geraldine is currently the Content Producer for Third Sector, an Akolade channel. Throughout her career, she has written for various industries and international audiences. Her love for writing extends beyond the corporate world, as she also works as a volunteer writer at her local church. Aside from writing, she is also fond of joining fun runs and watching musicals.
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