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Objectives Young people's participation in decision making that affects them is increasingly recognised and valued as a right. Youth participation in mental health settings is fundamental to service design and delivery, and is beneficial for the young people as well as the organisation. Headspace recognises the many benefits of youth participation with its national and local youth participation initiatives. In 2013, headspace Gosford in Australia established its current youth participation model, called the Youth Alliance (YA), consisting of 12 young people. These young people contribute ideas and opinions around service design and delivery, and participate in a range of activities. Method This paper presents the findings of a focus group conducted with the YA immediately following recruitment. All 12 young people participated in a two hour focus group which sought to identify the key reasons these young people joined the YA, and what they hope to achieve in their capacity of YA consultants. Results The two main reasons participants joined the YA are to help ‘overcome barriers to help seeking and ensure young people get the support they need’ and ‘to build confidence, social skills and make new friends’. The barriers to help seeking identified by the participants are consistent with those outlined in the literature. Conclusion Youth participation in youth mental health settings is beneficial to young people as well as organisations and the community, and it is crucial that strategies are put in place to increase youth participation. The ways in which these young people perceive their participation as beneficial to themselves as well as the organisation and the community is the focus of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to highlight how commonalities and differences between Australian children, parents and practitioners in terms of how they understand child resilience could inform the design and delivery of initiatives that aim to promote child resilience. A qualitative analysis of data from focus groups with children (n = 44), parents (n = 42) and practitioners (n = 107) undertaken in six Australian states and territories found key differences between the three groups in terms of: what they think resilience looks like in a child; and the factors that influence child resilience. The analysis also found a common agreement about the importance of supportive relationships to children's resilience. The findings suggest that initiatives that aim to promote child resilience may be more engaging and useful to children and parents if they: educate parents about the factors that influence child resilience; communicate the aims of resilience interventions to parents and children; focus on building supportive relationships for children; and explore community attitudes towards risk-taking. Highlights • Children and parents understand child resilience in different ways to practitioners • Compared to practitioners, parents and children are more likely to view children's resilience as an individual trait • Educating parents about the nature of resilience may increase support for initiatives that target children's environments [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people who live in residential care are at greater risk of experiencing sexual abuse and other forms of abuse than those living in other out of home care placements. To better understand how young people perceive and experience safety in residential care, and the things that they most need to be and feel safe, a qualitative study was conducted with 27 Australian children and young people for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This paper describes young people's perspectives on what makes residential care safe: supportive relationships, stability and predictability, fair rules, and having some control over their environment. Young people said that safety could be improved with: better appreciation of the risks in residential care; better matching, staffing and oversight; and better-designed responses that involve young people themselves. The findings provide critical insights from young people themselves and argue that adults and institutions need to appreciate their views of safety so as to adequately respond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss acculturation stress and social capital experienced by Congolese young refugees in regional Australia. Seventy percent of Australia's humanitarian entrants are young people; many settle in regional areas. However, the perspectives of young refugees in regional areas have received little attention. Qualitative in-depth interviewing and photo elicitation methods were conducted with sixteen Congolese young people. Findings revealed that these young people experienced unique acculturation stress including language problems, a lack of employment opportunities and difficulties accessing further education, impacting on their integration into Australian society. However, they relied on a range of social support from their friends, family, their ethnic community and the wider regional community to cope with these issues. This social support helped to strengthen their social capital and enhance their wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The study shows how mentoring programs create supportive communities for youth. • Mentors felt more prepared to support youth after training & practice as a mentor. • This helps to illustrate group- or community-level benefits from mentoring. • The paper shows what a "mentor rich" community may look like. Having a trusted adult in one's life can be a key support to young people in making and managing the transitions of young adulthood, however not all young people have access to such an adult. Formal youth mentoring programs aim to fill this gap for individual young people, but there is less understanding of the capacity of such programs to contribute to community-building and skill-building, so that there are more adults with the skills and sensibilities to support young people generally and be trusted adults for them, wherever they come across them in their communities. Drawing on a qualitative study of 15 mentors in an Australian youth mentoring program for high school students, this paper therefore examines mentors' perceptions of the capacity of the program to help cultivate supportive communities for young people, beyond those specifically mentored. It does this by examining how the mentors expected or anticipated applying the mentoring skills they learnt through the program to the support of other young people in the future. The findings show that, with some limits, mentors perceived that the program built their capacity to better support young people in the future, including young people beyond the program participants, such as those in their families, personal communities, workplaces and other volunteering contexts. These findings highlight that beyond contributing to youth support at an individual-level, youth mentoring programs may also hold some benefits at a group- or community-level, at least from the perspective of mentors. Implications for youth mentoring research, program delivery and funding are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]