Giving Compass' Take:

• PSI is committed to a youth-powered movement toward healthcare that honors and elevates young peoples' insights on health solutions. 

• PSI explains that there are challenges in implementing a youth-powered approach that requires constant re-evaluation. Can donors play a role in helping alleviate some tension?

• Read about why it is time to invest in youth power. 

The world’s rapidly growing youth population drives us to evolve how we reach our youngest consumers with the health solutions that will shape their lives. It means asking ourselves what it will take to find solutions in public health that will put power into the hands of our youngest consumers – and find ways that we make space for their voices to be heard.

For PSI, it means getting youth-powered.

Our youth-powered commitment catapulted a movement at PSI. In 2016, we pledged to reach 10 million young people under the age of 25 with modern contraception. As of Dec. 2018, 14 million young people have taken up a contraceptive method through PSI. We hit, and then surpassed our FP2020 pledge two years ahead of schedule.

We’ve done that by flipping the narrative where we as adults deem young people’s immediate needs. Rather, we honor young people as experts of their own lived experiences by elevating them as co-decision makers for the health solutions that serve them. Our job is to link our health outcome objectives to the objectives that young people define as their own immediate needs and future aspirations, like financial stability, and building this within a safe space. It’s a shift from a youth-focused to a youth-powered approach.

Alongside the members of the HCD Exchange, we launched the Commitment to Ethics in Youth-Powered Design at the International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP) in November 2018 to formalize principles for how we, as a community, can ensure that we respect, balance power with and do no harm to the young people we work with and for.

It’s from this baseline that we can then responsibly pursue two avenues simultaneously: building young leaders while remaining representative of the young people whom we serve.

Read the full article about youth-powered approach to healthcare by Amy Uccello at PSI.