Authoring Our Own Stories Roundtable 2025

This Wednesday was the fourth Roundtable event for Authoring Our Own Stories, a national youth voice project exploring how young people’s identities strongly influence access to opportunities and support. Young Leaders from Partnership for Young London Youth Focus North West Youth Focus South West and Yorks and Humber Youth Work Units shared outcomes for this year.

The session opened with a powerful poem called The Things We Carry, co-created with spoken word artist Matt Abbott. It explored common themes of belonging and unbelonging among young people across different regions.  Regional groups then presented their findings and recommendations, including topics around safety, emotional wellbeing, education, employment and training. Colleagues were then given time to respond to what had been shared. Sandra, the National Lead for this work, emphasised the importance of translating recommendations into tangible outcomes and stressed that implementing current data into actions would be the priority in 2026;  the final year of this project.

The conversation ended with discussions on a comprehensive list of what colleagues will do across their local areas to translate recommendations into actions. These included Cllr Laing from Plymouth agreeing to set up a meeting between Plymouth young people and new councillor champion for violence against women and girls and broadening curriculum recommendation in meetings about creativity and cultural opportunities in schools. Professor Nicola Martin from London Southbank University committed to make university resources available for free including conference facilities and the art gallery. Chelsea Jackson, Regional Lead for Barnsley, will build on their progress of co-producing solutions with young people, including work with Dr Kat Simpson, at the University of Huddersfield, on the development of a social media hub called the Collective Youth Hub and Young leaders from Knowsley will continue to share the community map created that shows where, in Knowsley, is important to young people and where they spend their time, including youth groups, community centres, sports, parks, and public transport. Young people in the research also highlighted that there are important places, such as Whiston Hospital, that are difficult to reach for young people living in areas such as Kirkby, so they wanted to show this physical distance on the community map too.

For more information about Authoring Our Own Stories contact sandra.vacciana@cityoflondon.gov.uk.