Healthy Voices: positive engagement with youth
Healthy Voices, a website aimed at young people to engage and talk with them about childhood obesity, is live! Click here to discover this new resource!
Increasingly, we are seeing a desire for young people to get their voices heard. However, true and lasting effects to positively impact youth health, including overweight and obesity, will not only need to include young people’s input, perspective and suggestions: the leadership of young people themselves needs to be part of the answer. For this reason, the World Obesity Federation has created a website that will provide young people with the necessary knowledge and advocacy tools to promote their positive engagement to address health-related challenges.
Healthy Voices will simultaneously exploit the results and learning from both the STOP and CO-CREATE project, and sustain positive youth-engagement. It is an educational and capacity-building platform and provides a space for blogs and discussions. It aims to provide young people with some tools and expertise about how to become actively involved in shaping their environments and become agents of change.
As highlighted in a newly released piece by some of our colleagues in the latest issue of Eurohealth focused on the 2019 European Health Forum Gastein Conference, young people are the stimulus for change. “You(th) Matters – Co-creating policies to tackle obesity” highlights how CO-CREATE adopts a novel approach to address the obesity epidemic, and highlights the value of a participatory approach and the co-creation with youth in the establishment of health policy priorities and ultimately in the formulation of policy proposals.
