Adolescents and youth

Adolescent and youth initiatives

Building infrastructure and capacity for young people’s involvement in mental health initiatives

Young people best understand their challenges and are passionate about addressing them with their unique, local perspectives. Unfortunately, many humanitarian and development efforts fail to genuinely involve them, often resulting in tokenism or manipulation.

This approach not only denies young people their right to contribute to decisions affecting them but also misses opportunities to create sustainable solutions for the mental health and well-being of youth worldwide. Throughout our work, we strive to reduce power imbalances between adults and young people in MHPSS initiatives.

We achieve this by fostering secure and meaningful involvement, participation and leadership of adolescents and youth in programme development, advocacy and research. We aim to enhance the capacity, voices and leadership of young individuals, enabling them to advocate for, develop, and research solutions to promote their mental health and well-being now and in the future.