Youth Engagement: Opening the Doors to Difficult Conversations Toolkit© Training
Working with Youth
The Youth Engagement: Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations Toolkit© provides activities, tools, and information to help adult allies facilitate youth groups. Toolkit activities are designed to provide young people with reliable, accurate, and credible information to encourage them to reflect on their health, make informed decisions about conditions that influence their health, and promote the importance of seeking help when needed. Each activity provides adult allies with ways to open conversations with youth and facilitate discussions about their experiences with alcohol while providing education about alcohol use (their own, their friends, and their communities), alcohol-related harms, harm-reduction, and possible coping strategies. Activities help youth make links between substance use and an increased risk of unintended pregnancy (and subsequently, FASD), sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections (STBBIs), unhealthy relationships, impaired driving, violence, and injuries.
Training Adult Allies (e.g., Social Workers, Youth Coordinators, Service Providers, Guidance Counselors)
Toolkit training workshops are capacity building workshops for Saskatchewan adult allies to engage youth in conversations about alcohol and alcohol-related harms. The sessions provide training about the concepts of facilitation, youth engagement, adult allyship, being trauma informed, and creating safe spaces. Trained adult allies gain access to the toolkit and are able to utilize it according to their group’s needs when engaging with youth.
If you are interested in attending a workshop or setting up one within your organization, please contact the Youth FASD Prevention Program Coordinator at: info@skprevention.ca.
Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations Toolkit© is designed to assist adult allies in promoting youth health by facilitating groups for youth of any gender identity between the ages of 13-18. The Youth Engagement Toolkit’s primary focus is the upstream prevention of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and other alcohol-related harms.
Opening the Door to Difficult Conversations© is the combination of three toolkits previously created by the Prevention Institute: At-Risk to Resilient©, The Way Forward©, and Just for Us©. These toolkits were combined and adapted to support accessibility, adaptivity, and inclusiveness.