Developing a Youth-Leadership Programme for Deaf Children in, and beyond, South Africa

该项目将把AH/R005354/1号文件(改变故事：在冲突后环境中为年轻人建设民间社会)的研究成果应用于新的背景下，即与聋哑儿童合作。这将使我们能够在三个层面产生重大的、以前没有预料到的新影响：在南非Ekurhuleni的弱势失聪儿童社区内，在支持这些年轻人的机构内，在儿童福利和保护政策层面，在南非全国范围内与社会发展部合作，在国际上与联合国、欧盟和英联邦政府首脑会议(CHOGM)合作。《改变故事》询问了12个地方和中等收入国家的民间社会组织如何设法解决青年参与问题，特别是如何设计以艺术为基础的方案编制，以促进青年更好地拥有发展成果。我们委托并评价了21个由青年设计和由青年牵头的项目，这些项目力求扩大青年的声音，以便在广泛的背景下和在多个层面上实现变革。例如，在津巴布韦，我们与年轻的街头艺术家合作，倡导汤加少数民族社区的人权；在南非，我们利用参与性电影制作来提高(除其他外)对非法移民‘无证’儿童的困境的认识，或提高对性别暴力的认识，侧重于青年发声的问题；在卢旺达，我们利用基层的参与性做法来制定国家课程。我们的研究试图在两个方面创新CSO实践。一方面，我们探索了由青年领导的参与式方法，强调了采取情景方法进行文化生产的重要性，强调了艺术产品与社会背景之间的关系。在参与性项目中，这一点往往被忽视，因为参与性项目往往更多地关注参与过程本身，这样做往往会忽视参与的一个关键动机。另一方面，我们的工作突出了参与的结构性影响。虽然让年轻人参与项目设计的概念越来越普遍，但《改变故事》强调的是让方案从根本上对年轻人负责。这在发展项目中更为罕见，因为在发展项目中，对资助者的问责通常仍然是优先事项。因此，我们的项目促进了关于“向下问责”的不断增长的文献，以及支持年轻人塑造组织实践的方式不仅可以改善发展成果和增加资金效益，而且还可以克服经常讨论的“捐赠者疲劳”现象(沃丁顿2020)。我们研究的与本提案特别相关的例子包括“青年主导的社区评估”，这是由一些改变故事项目试行的，用来促进民间社会组织、他们所支持的年轻人和更广泛的利益攸关方之间的对话，以便追究民间社会组织对其提供的服务的责任。在拟议的项目中，我们将：1)促进聋儿融入社会，发展他们的自我辩护能力。我们将重新审视我们以前在南非工作的经验，以便与希望和儿童之家(HHC)、国际聋哑人协会(DKI)、聋人协会和西蒙主教信托基金(BST)合作，创建一个以艺术为基础的领导力课程。我们将与DKI和Deaf SA合作，帮助BST和HHC建设组织能力。该项目将为他们提供新的技能和新的方案设计方法，帮助他们在整个方案中更有效地融入和支持聋哑儿童。3)支持青年主导的南南知识交流，为国家和国际的儿童福利和保护政策提供信息。

This project will apply research findings from AH/R005354/1 (Changing the Story: Building Civil Society with and for young people in post-conflict settings) in a new context, namely to work with deaf children. This will allow us to generate significant new, and previously unanticipated, impact at three levels: within communities of vulnerable deaf children across Ekurhuleni, South Africa, within the agencies that support these young people, and at child-welfare and protection policy-level, working nationally in South Africa with the Department of Social Development and internationally with the UN, the EU and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). Changing the Story has interrogated how CSOs across 12 LMICs have sought to address the issue of youth engagement, looking at the ways in which arts-based programming, in particular, can be designed to foster better youth-ownership of development outcomes. We have commissioned and evaluated 21 youth-designed and youth-led projects that have sought to amplify the voices of young people to effect change in a wide range of contexts and at a number of levels. In Zimbabwe, for example, we worked with young street artists to advocate for human rights of the minority Tonga community, in South Africa we have used participatory filmmaking to raise awareness of (inter alia) the plight of the 'undocumented' children of illegal migrants, or of gender-based violence, focussing on questions of youth voice, or in Rwanda we have used grass-roots, participatory practices to shape the national curriculum. Our research has sought to innovative CSO practice in two ways. On the one hand, we have explored youth-led participatory methodologies, highlighting the importance of taking a situated approach to cultural production, emphasizing the relationship between artistic product and social context. This is often ignored in participatory projects that tend to focus far more on the process of engagement itself, and in so doing often ignore a key motivation for participation. On the other, our work highlights the structural implications of participation. While the notion of engaging young people in project design is increasingly common place, Changing the Story has emphasized making programmes fundamentally accountable to young people. This is more unusual in development projects, where accountability to the funder generally remains the priority. Thus, our project has contributed to the growing literature on 'downward accountability' and the ways in which supporting young people to shape organisational practice can not only improve development outcomes and increase value for money, but also overcome the much discussed phenomenon of 'donor fatigue' (Waddington 2020). Examples from our research of particular relevance to this present proposal include 'youth-led community assessments', piloted by a number of the Changing the Story projects and used to facilitate dialogue between CSOs, the young people they support and wider stakeholders in order to hold CSOs to account for the services they provide. In proposed project we will:1) Foster integration of deaf children and develop their self-advocacy skills. We will revisit learning from our earlier work in South Africa in order to create an arts-based leadership programme in partnership with Hope and Homes for Children (HHC), DeafKidz International (DKI), Deaf SA and the Bishop Simeon Trust (BST).2) Support relevant agencies to develop more inclusive practices. Working in partnership with DKI and Deaf SA, we will help BST and HHC to build organisational capacity. The project will provide them with new skills, and new approaches to programme design, helping them to integrate and support deaf children more effectively across their programmes.3) Support youth-led South-South knowledge exchange to inform child-welfare and protection policy nationally and internationally.