HEALTH PROMOTION INTERNATIONAL Vol. 19. No. 3 © Oxford University Press 2004. All rights reserved.
RESOURCE REVIEW |
Health2004 Conference: Youth in Focus
Chair, Youth Involvement and Participation Working Group, World Health 2004, Project Officer, City of Greater Dandenong Health2004, the 18th International Conference on Health Promotion and Health Education held in Melbourne in April 2004, attracted 2900 delegates from over 90 countries. Health2004 was a rich forum that showcased a stimulating, inspiring and thought-provoking scientific program, set against a backdrop of a rich and colorful cultural and entertainment program. Health2004 challenged health practitioners to broaden their professional frameworks and challenge culturally ingrained beliefs and practices. The conference theme, ‘Valuing Diversity, Reshaping Power: Exploring Pathways for Health and Wellbeing’ also offered an opportunity to focus on youth and the future of health promotion.
The Youth Involvement and Participation Working Group was led by a diverse group of young and not so young professionals, including students, lecturers, community workers, health promoters, a nurse, youth workers, a government representative, a philanthropic sector representative, a couple of health professionals, teachers and trainers. We were diverse with respect to age, cultural background, religious orientation, family and relationship background/circumstances and health status, but had a common interest in exploring just what ‘diversity’ and ‘reshaping power’ meant for youth participation. The common thread among us was a conviction that young people had a place and a role in shaping responses to their health needs, and that young professionals were in a unique position to teach as well as learn. Over a period of 
2 years, the Youth Involvement and Participation conference strategy evolved, with input from the Working Group, the local conference organizing committee and the secretariat.
The Working Group began to piece together what it meant to be a young person or a young professional in today's changing world. Operating within a capacity building model, the Working Group's initial objectives were modest but two-fold; (i) to ensure a youth presence in the content and scientific program of the conference; and (ii) to facilitate youth involvement, presence and participation throughout its planning stages and during the conference. Carefully selecting strategies that could be managed given voluntary Working Group member's time constraints, the Working Group began to shape their responses to the conference themes, recognizing they were a privileged few and determined to speak on behalf of those who did not have the opportunity to speak for themselves.
Local and international health professionals moved in and out of the structure. There was also a youth stream of the Scientific Program Working Group that targeted four key themes initially identified by the Youth Involvement and Participation Working Group as affecting young people's health: employment, education, the environment, and ethics and empowerment. The Scientific Program youth stream leader worked with the Youth Participation and Involvement Group to identify and recruit key presenters for each of the scheduled sessions to ensure that a basic infrastructure would be in place to focus on youth. Further presenters were selected from the abstracts that were submitted for this stream. The goal was to have a mixture of presentations that emphasized theory, practice and workforce development. The team worked on engaging presenters from more marginalized countries and cultures, attempting to facilitate a more diverse range of presentations. Additionally, the sessions explored the policy and infrastructure implications of providing for greater participation of young people in decision-making and involvement in implementing and evaluating work programs that influenced their lives.
As April 2004 drew nearer, the Working Group culture developed a life of its own, characterized by a supportive network, a mechanism to challenge and develop its members, and a shared professional growth experience that sat alongside the challenges of exam time pressures, neglected thesis deadlines, neglected families, and employers tapping their wristwatches because of our paid employment commitments. The Working Group continued to support each other, welcoming new members who injected new life and energy, and reaching out to those who possessed the expertise necessary for a given task. The Working Group hoped to achieve the pilot and evaluation of a practical and malleable model of youth participation in an international health conference, and the result far surpassed the expectations of even the most optimistic amongst us.
The week began with the Foundation for Young Australians Youth Networking Breakfast, which was an opportunity for young professional delegates to share an early meal with each other, to meet, to network and to be inspired by guest speakers, including the Honorary Bronwyn Pike, Minister for Health. Youth delegates provided supportive environments for each other by offering support for each other's presentations, and by spending time together to share ideas, visions, challenges and hopes for the conference and its impact on their work beyond. The desire to network did not stop there, with many youth delegates eager to join an online network post-conference.
Delegates reported highlights in the youth stream as those where speakers emphasized brilliant work being done that genuinely involved young people, and examined the meaningful application and critical evaluation of strategies working with young people in participatory models. For example, those presented by Associate Professor Karen Malone (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), Asia-Pacific Director of UNESCO, and Helen Cahill from the Australian Youth Research Centre and her young co-presenters, were illustrative.
The ThinkTalkACT forum was an energetic and thought-provoking evening held in partnership with the City of Melbourne, and was offered both to conference delegates and young people not attending the conference, as part of the Youth Strategy and the Public Program. Performers and young health professionals spoke from their experiences of working with indigenous young people, of country development, commerce and HIV/AIDS. The Working Group even organized a ‘Walking Forum Bus’ between venues as Working Group members realized the importance of a safe environment, particularly for young people visiting as guest co-presenters, and young professional delegates. Other programs provided for professional development included road safety (Fit to Drive), sexuality and anti-homophobia strategies (Way Out), healthy physical activity and team building (Greater Dandenong Sports Project) and youth governance (City of Melbourne).
Over the week, the Youth Involvement and Participation Working Group hosted a youth booth in the exhibition area, showcasing different and innovative local grassroots health promoting programs each day. The booth also served as a welcoming base for conference headquarters and for visitors. A number of delegates reported that they knew where to find the youth booth, as it was the noisiest one! Two initiatives that emerged from the Working Group's Youth Strategy were designed to facilitate both local and remote participation of young people in conference governance and health promotion activities: the Youth Website (which was designed by two young professionals) and the Youth Mentoring Project (developed and deployed by two university students). These two initiatives demonstrated the capacity-building philosophy of the Working Group.
The Youth Website initially emerged as a means to facilitate young professionals' input into discussion around youth health issues, from both within the conference and from abroad through an online forum. Although this did not turn out as planned, the process and end result communicating youth functions and events remained true to the Working Group's overall aims. The Youth Mentoring Program also operated largely behind the scenes until the conference, setting up structures in which young professionals could be matched with more experienced scientific stream leaders in order to work together and inform the process of scientific stream development. The Youth Mentoring Project became a highlight at the Youth Booth, and as an oral poster, with many young professionals expressing their need for support, mentoring and networking. As a result of this interest, the Youth Mentoring Project will now continue post-conference, building networks between interested mentors and potential mentees.
As the week drew to an end, the Youth Working Group and the team of youth volunteers, without whom none of the Youth Strategy would have been possible, had a chance to reflect on experiences, conversations and memories of the previous 4 days. Three themes emerged:
- There is a need for real cross-sectoral and cross-generational collaboration and partnership if young people are truly to have a meaningful voice in the process of addressing their health needs. This can only be achieved if there a genuine desire to see young people empowered, in conjunction with environments conducive to young people's involvement. Systems need to be put into place in order to support young people and to prevent them being set up to fail, so it is imperative that when engaging with young people in the spirit of participation, provision is made for genuine decision-making power to exist in a supportive environment.
- Young professionals are often disadvantaged and lost in the myriad of systemic regulations and processes of which they are sometimes unaware. In a space where they are discovering their own frameworks and modes of operation, young professionals need genuine support and nurturing in order to reach their full potential, before they become exhausted and lose heart. It also became very apparent that young people and young professionals are not a homogenous group; the diversity that characterizes both groups needed to be recognized and reflected in health promoting programs, professional development programs, education programs and avenues of involvement.
- Young people and professionals are both the present and the future of health promotion and the health of our society. But they cannot achieve this alone. More experienced professionals have a responsibility to support both the young people they are providing health services to and targeting health promotion activities at—young professionals who will hold onto the reigns of change and innovation. Only through moving forward together will real health improvements be achieved. It is only through working together, exploring the many pathways to health, that we can truly value diversity and reshape power.
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