Over the last couple of years, the Rejuvenate project team have been mapping research that has focused on working with children and young people, or that children and young people have led themselves. The process pulled out positive examples of social transformation that were led by children and young people with support from adult allies, rather than research where children and youth were passive participants.

The Rejuvenate Living Archive

The result is the Rejuvenate Living Archive, bringing together resources, organisations and projects from a wide range of geographies and time periods. The iterative process of creating the Living Archive created the foundations for a set of proposed field principles to guide participatory work with children and young people.

The Rejuvenate team wants to hear from IDS Alumni working on children and young people’s rights and participation, who are interested in joining the conversation and growing network around these issues.  

The principles and the Living Archive are intended as a springboard for further work that substantively recognises the importance of children’s participation in work to further child rights, and to enrich and rejuvenate the societies of which children are a part.

The authors of the report, Vicky Johnson (UHI), IDS Research Fellow Tessa Lewin, and IDS Research Officer and alum Mariah Cannon (MADev10), have issued a call to action to academics, decision makers, advocates, and programme implementers involved in working with children and young people:

“We view this as the start of an inclusive process of contributing to and building up international dialogue about children’s and youth participation and creating regional networks to share learning on concepts, rights, and goals. We invite you to contribute to our project, to critique our work, to improve on it, to help build our living archive, and to test our principles; to rejuvenate.”

Find out more about the process of creating the Living Archive in the project’s recent working paper “Learning from a Living Archive: Rejuvenating Child and Youth Rights and Participation”.

How to get involved with Rejuvenate

The project team encourage you to get in touch with any examples of organisations, projects or resources which would add to the Living Archive. You can send your submissions via the Rejuvenate website.