Over a 4 week period Living Well and Agency teams ran a series of 7 co-design events – 2 local events in each of the three boroughs involved in the project and 1 pan-London event at City Hall. The first three events were with young women aged 16-19 in the boroughs of Wandsworth, Lambeth and Southwark. We then held a larger event at City Hall where young people, practitioners and innovators from across London worked together with the funders. Followed by three further events in each of the boroughs with the aim of engaging with local professionals and service providers.

Through these events we involved 75 people in the process of co-designing the content and positioning for the new CluedUp programme. Prior to the events we also sent out an online survey to over 500 young people, organisations and practitioners across London.

The responses were used to help inform and frame the questions and tools we used for the co-design events and all of the content generated by both styles of interventions has now been analysed and broken down in to themes.

We are posting all of this up on to the website here so that we can receive feedback, both to inform the next stage of the process and also to ensure that everyone taking part feels that their views have been well represented.

The first exercise that we asked participants at the events to do, was to give instinctive reactions to statements that we had drawn out from the survey responses.

The next exercise was to create persona’s, either of people that they had worked with or peers, or even entirely make-believe, but a developed character of a young woman between the age of 16-19 with details of her personality and life circumstances. These persona’s were then used to take through a series of questions or an imagined journey about the ” ideal ” programme.

The questions were:

• How does she become aware of the programme?
• How is the programme relevant / important to her?
• What happens when she is uses it/what engages her in wanting to keep coming back?
• How will you know that she is satisfied with the programme?
• How will she feed back about the programme to us and to others?

Participants were asked to generate ideas imagining themselves as the persona that they’d created.

The next exercise was based around the themes generated from the online survey and the Young Women’s events we’d run the week previously. The 5 themes that had been drawn out of this data as being central to the content for the programme were:

• Building confidence
• Making and keeping friends
• Increasing awareness of consequences
• What makes a ” good” relationship
• Building resilience

All important themes, but not necessarily unexpected. So we asked the participants, ” how do you actually teach resilience?”,  ” How do you build confidence? ” and we asked them to do this through looking at the challenge from a different lens by giving them character cards.

The final activity was to design an influencing and relationship strategy. Participants were asked to map out all of the partnership organisations and programmes, key influencers and stakeholders to connect CluedUp in to, as well as all of the potential groups and places that 16-19 year old young women could be found. This is a particular focus for the CluedUp programme to ensure strong collaborative and partnered ways of working with other service providers and practitioners, so as to ensure it is useful and complimentary rather than replicating something that already exists.