Wicked Wellbeing: Empowering design thinkers to tackle an urgent mental health crisis

We urgently need to recognise the importance of young people's insights and experiences to create better mental wellbeing solutions. While young people may hold innovative ideas and solutions, they are also prone to suffering from poor mental health conditions, almost no matter where they are in the world. For young people to devise solutions that make a real difference in their lives, organisations and stakeholders must ensure supportive and enabling platforms for explorations, ideas, and actions.

Therefore, we're launching a design thinking project to help young people and organisations collaborate to create strategies and solutions to improving mental wellbeing. We'll use participatory methods to gain insight into their diverse perspectives and develop ideas, concepts, and actions to test and refine. Through research, collaboration, and ideation, the project is committed to designing innovative solutions with young people to advance mental wellbeing.

Design Thinking provides the tools to create a collaborative environment and develop solutions that are tailored to young people's needs and strengths. The project will support young people and organisations to build a shared understanding and co-create better solutions and actionable steps to improve organisational settings and capacity to support youth mental wellbeing.

This may include:

• how to support young people in accessing mental health and wellbeing resources and services
• how to ensure relevant education on mental health and wellbeing
• how to support safe spaces for young people to share their thoughts, experiences, and feelings

Project partners will work with young people in their local communities to gain insights and encourage them to share experiences. This will help the organisations recognise that a comprehensive approach is needed to address various factors that impact mental wellbeing, such as access to information and healthcare, social and economic conditions, and environmental issues. The intercultural exchanges will allow project partners to gain a better understanding of the diverse and shared experiences of young people across cultural and social differences. In addition, young people will exchange new and innovative ideas by contributing with their unique insights coming from different circumstances.

The project will 1) develop an explorative platform for young people to research and share their insights and experiences of maintaining and improving their mental wellbeing, and 2) share findings and best practices between the partner organisations and stakeholders.

By ensuring that young people's voices and experiences are represented throughout the process, this project aims to explore and create better and more comprehensive support for youth mental wellbeing within youth organisations and beyond.

Learn more about us and our mission
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