Governments make sweeping changes to young people's lives - affecting their educaiton, life prospects, and mental health, to name a few. It can often feel like young people are powerless to do anything about this - that they just have to sit by whilst those changes are made without consulting them. The voice of young people is so rarely heard in politics and decision-making.

When young people are consulted on what they want for the future, it can be incredibly tokenistic. Public engagement events are run just so organisations can pat themselves on the back, pretend that they're doing meaningfully participatory engagement, and limit the development of young people's autonomy - so they're always involved.

In this project, we explored how we could ensure young people's voices were at the heart of changes made to their lives through the use of speculative and future-focused methods. We developed a game involving bespoke cards that helped to build connections between groups of strangers, supporting them to connect their visions of the future together and build practical methods of reaching those futures.

We analysed the data and created the It's Our Future manifesto, which was the basis of our charity partner's election influencing strategy for 2019. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was unable to go much further than this, but there was a planned suite of follow-up engagement. Instead, in 2021, we ran fractured signals to continue the ideas and methods of this project.

Read more:

• https://openlab.ncl.ac.uk/research/it’s-our-future-putting-young-people-at-the-centre-of-building-their-future/
• https://www.barnardos.org.uk/its-our-future
• https://www.barnardos.org.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/%23ItsOurFuture%20-%20Let%27s%20build%20it%20together_1.pdf