How to Involve Children Every Step on the Way – How to Involve Children and Youth in Your Work

Section

The peer-learning journey “How to Involve Children and Youth in Your Work” is a series of online webinars organised by Philea’s Children and Youth Network throughout 2024 and 2025 that aim to advance youth inclusion in the work of foundations by providing concrete pathways and tools to implement. Following each module, foundations that are willing to transform their way of working with young people can benefit from input from organisations with specific expertise on a given topic.

The seventh module explored “How to Involve Children Every Step on the Way” with the Learning for Well-being Foundation and Eurochild on 16 September 2025. Read on to discover the key points and recommendations from presenters and those involved in the project.. Read on to discover the key points and recommendations from presenters and those involved in the project

Aims and content

Based on the concrete case study in the collaboration between the Learning for Well-being Foundation and Eurochild to co-create a child-friendly version of the European Commission’s Guidelines on Well-being and Mental Health at School (published May 2024), the organisations shared insights on how to involve children in developing child-friendly versions of political documents and guidelines.

Learning topics covered

What makes a document child-friendly: Understanding the essential features of child-friendly documents and the steps required to develop them effectively.
Engaging stakeholders in the co-creation process: Exploring how to involve children and other key actors in a meaningful way and understanding the unique aspects of collaborative work in this context.
Identifying the supportive services, institutional structures, and regulatory frameworks needed to ensure these child-friendly documents are developed, implemented, and used effectively.

The project

The Eurochild Children’s Council worked together with the Learning for Well-being Foundation on the child-friendly version of the European Commission Guidelines on Mental Health and Well-Being at School by adapting its content, translating it into a child-friendly language, and transforming its format and design to be visually engaging and accessible to children, while preserving the original meaning of the document.

The guidelines are designed to support education professionals and policy-makers in promoting a holistic and inclusive approach to education, prioritising equity, diversity, and multicultural understanding. They offer evidence-based guidance complemented by concrete examples of best practices.

Title	Child-friendly versions of institutional and policy documents
Country	Online
Year	2025
Mode of participation	Leading
Age of young people involved	13-17

Point in philanthropic cycle

Investigating the views of children/youth on the issues (research)
Staff: Building capacity of foundation staff

Recommendations based on this experience:

Start from the very beginning by listening to young people with your heart, hands and head and truly pay attention to what they say and express.
Let them lead the process and feel a sense of ownership over their proposals
Respect and accept who they are, what they suggest, and be accountable for what they ask

Excerpt from Module 7 Q&A

How did you succeed in creating a European-wide youth council and how does it work in practice? For examples, being minors, do you have accompanying adults allocated for you by the organisation when you travel abroad?

At Eurochild, we managed to have children from across Europe thanks to our large network of organisations: Every two years, we open a call for applications for a new court of Eurochild Children’s Council (ECC), we share it across our members, and we select 12 applicants from the pool. During the application process, we look at a number of conditions to select our ECC: One is indeed having a supporting organisation that commits to support and accompany the children every time they travel. Another one is to have a good level of English, not necessarily fluent, but good enough to understand the activities of the ECC. In our selection process, we always strive to have a good geographical and gender balance in the group. At Eurochild, we also have produced some guidelines on how to create children’s councils.

And then, more generally, we have safeguarding rules put in place, meaning that for examples when ECC members need to travel, we ask their parents’ consent, and we comply with all the obligations and requirements (e.g. legal, medical, etc.).

We try to organise every meeting in such a way that it is as pedagogical as possible, and it addresses both our joint advocacy needs but also the interests for the ECC members. For example, two years ago we consulted children across Europe to know from them what our priorities should be, and it resulted that one of them is mental health. This is why we decided to focus on mental health and, as part of this, how this work around the policy mentioned in this webinar originated.

Quotes

“Creating a child friendly and accessible version of a document is not just about putting young people in a room, giving them some paper and pens and coming back two hours later and expecting a finished document. It’s about a chance to work together with experts”

Darren Bird, Learning For Well-being Foundation

“I really liked debating in the groups during this project, and particularly the “head, heart, and hand” part where I learned we all look at things from a very different perspective”.

Leon, Eurochild Children’s Council