Equitable design to help young black people’s mental health

YoungMinds is a young people’s mental health charity that recognises that their current offer predominantly serves young white people. We need to do better for people from minority backgrounds and marginalised people.

We will share how we took a design-led approach to a project exploring how we could do more to support young Black people with their mental health. We’ll talk through what we did, what we learnt and the discussions, challenges and surprises we had along the way.

Participant Takeaways:

• The reality behind what we call “equitable design” - the opportunities to move beyond “centring” a group and really address systemic challenges, understand the lives of young Black people who are under-represented, and involve them to design solutions with them that can help.
• How co-design challenged our assumptions and the therapeutic power of participation
• How to check our biases, what worked for us and what didn’t, what surprised us and might surprise you too
• The importance of reflecting on the structure of our teams, what psychological safety can look like and how we recognised the burden of being involved in this work, for Black colleagues

Themes:
Co-design, equitable design, design sprints, discovery, prototyping , capability building , introducing design approaches.