Reflections on a campaign: growing together for Children’s Mental Health Week

We ran our first fully collaborative campaign with the Wolfson Centre’s Youth Advisors in support of Children’s Mental Health Week. In this blog post, we want to showcase the wonderful work we did together with young people in support of the awareness week.

This year’s theme for Children’s Mental Health Week was ‘Growing Together’. The awareness week is run each year by the charity, Place2Be, and they asked us all to reflect on how we have grown in the past year and how we can best help others to grow.

To tie in with this year’s theme for Children’s Mental Health Week, the Wolfson Centre Youth Advisors reflected on these questions in their January meeting and, working with the centre’s staff, created five original social media graphics to highlight their own reflections on the theme of growth.

Creating the graphics

The young people shared their thoughts and offered quotes on ways in which they have grown in the past year and how they feel is the best way to help others to grow.

The Youth Advisors surpassed our expectations with thoughtful and powerful reflections which served as inspiration for social media graphics.

I then created original, vibrant graphics, all illustrated with images that tied to the young people’s words, which were shared across the Wolfson Centre’s social media platforms every day during the awareness week.

The words also inspired recurring daily content on the Centre’s Instagram stories, where each day at different times I shared a moving scrapbook animation to reveal the young people’s reflections and was able to focus the entire week’s content around the graphics.

It was great to work together with the young people again and create exciting content for this year’s Children’s Mental Health Week campaign. Scroll to the bottom of this blog to see all the graphics created in partnership with our Youth Advisors.

It was also interesting to reflect on the theme of growth as we reach the six months mark of our first year of meetings.

Sharing the Group Promise

With this in mind, we used the awareness week as an opportunity to share the young people’s Group Promise, a commitment to how we and the youth advisory groups will behave and support each other in our monthly sessions.

The poster of the pledge was also designed by one of our members, another example of our partnership in action.

Co-production and collaboration with young people are really important to us and I’m looking forward to continuing to work with our Youth Advisors on creative projects like this in the coming months.

Our Youth Advisors’ contribution to creative opportunities like this, as well as guiding our mental health research priorities, help us to continue to embed the experiences and voices of young people at the heart of the Wolfson Centre’s work.

Snapshots of the campaign

To find out more about the Wolfson Centre’s Youth Advisory Groups and the research centre’s collaborative work with young people, please visit our website.