Overview

The Youth Voices Research Group (YVRG) is a self-supported research and social innovation unit affiliated with the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. We focus on creating accessible, responsive, and health promoting systems for youth and young adults. Our research team combines nearly 15 years of experience working in youth engagement with leading-edge action research and systems-informed methods to enable young people to have a greater voice and opportunities to lead social change efforts for a healthier society. This approach relies on the use of social media technologies to connect, illuminate, and communicate ideas and people across geographic, social, educational and cultural boundaries to establish effective collaborative partnerships for health. The YVRG has more than 16 years experience working with youth and youth-serving communities as instigators of community-based research projects and generators of knowledge on health promotion.

The mandate of the YVRG is threefold:

1. Evalution We help organizations assess the value of their work by focusing on the process and outcomes of health promotion practice and policy development. Our work incorporates multiple strategies of social engagement, systems-informed research methods (e.g. ‘Unconferences’, social networking, systems dynamics modeling), and arts-informed techniques (e.g., Photovoice, documentary filmmaking) with conventional social science tools as means of aiding organizations in visualizing their impact.

2. Knowledge translation, communication & partnership development The YVRG works at the nexus of public health science and the community to bring organizations and youth together from diverse backgrounds using participatory conference models, online social networks and distribution of research through working papers, interactive presentations and publications aimed at getting the best health promotion evidence into action

3. Training & Capacity Development We aim to strengthen the health promotion capacity of our partners by providing them with tools, techniques and strategies to enable them to engage youth and their staff and organizational partners effectively on their own through creating sustainable plans for action. We offer a range of support services that are tailored to meet the needs of our service and research partners.

YVRG’s reach is expanding, and our reputation for being a leading organization in the area of innovative youth engagement research strategies is growing in Ontario and internationally. We are currently engaged with a number of collaborating partners who have requested our support as their lead consulting agency. Many of these partnerships represent an extension of our existing partner-network and demonstrates our ability to maintain positive working relationships and produce value for organizations. It also endorses our vision of creating sustainable momentum for community groups. The fact that some these groups are new to our circle and have approached us without any marketing suggests the impact that our work has had on the field of health promotion and youth engagement.

To learn more about the TeenNet Project and the history of the YVRG see Our History

Youth Voices Research Group is the leading collaboratory within a larger family of projects called CoNEKTR. Learn more about CoNEKTR