THRIVE Initiative
THRIVE is a youth-focused intersectoral research, practice, policy, and partnership initiative of CPN-PREV. It advances youth-centered policies by focusing on the critical voices of young people in dialogue with practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.
THRIVE
Towards Harversting Responsability, Innovation, Voice and Engagement
Grounded in dignity, social justice, and agency, THRIVE creates spaces for shared learning and co-creation to inform more responsive, ethical, and effective approaches to preventing violence.
Focusing on youth-centred policies, THRIVES brings the critical perspectives of young people into dialogue with practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.
Nothing about youth without youth
THRIVE is the CPN-PREV initiative that explores safety and belonging along with the prevention of violence for young people and most importantly from their perspectives.
Too often, conversations about preventing violent extremism (PVE) focus on risk: What makes young people vulnerable? What puts them at risk? How can we prevent their involvement in violence?
THRIVE asks a different question: What helps young people feel safe, connected, heard, valued, and able to thrive in the places they call home?
By centering young people’s own experiences and perspectives, THRIVE shifts the conversation from preventing harm to understanding what helps young people and communities flourish. This shift changes not only the question, but also who is recognized as having knowledge and expertise.
THRIVE recognizes young people as knowledge holders and partners in understanding their communities.Their voices are essential to understanding what safety means, identifying what matters most, and imagining what could be different.
Youth Engagement is a commitment, not just a method
Nothing about youth without youth means moving from speaking about young people to thinking, learning, and acting with them.
Young people hold knowledge about their own lives, relationships, communities, institutions, and online and offline environments that cannot be replaced by professional, policy, or academic expertise.
For THRIVE, meaningful youth engagement therefore goes beyond asking young people for their opinions. Engaging our youth means creating opportunities for their knowledge and perspectives to shape the questions being asked, challenge assumptions, and influence the actions that follow.
Youth Engagement for THRIVE requires reciprocity and accountability. When young people share their time, knowledge, ideas and experiences, we have a responsibility to communicate what happens with what they have shared — including what can change, what cannot, and why.
Whose perspective are we hearing?
There is no single “youth perspective.”
Young people experience safety, belonging, institutions, discrimination, opportunities, and their communities in differently. Yet some voices are more likely than others to be heard in institutional and public conversations.
Meaningful youth engagement therefore means asking more than whether young people have been included: Who are we hearing from? Who is missing? Whose knowledge is being recognized? And what might make participation difficult, inaccessible, or unsafe?
These questions also ask us to look inward. What do we need to change in our own approaches to create space for perspectives that are less often heard?
THRIVE pays particular attention to the relationships, trust, accessibility, support, and diverse forms of engagement needed to create meaningful space for a wide range of youth perspectives.
This approach reflects CPN-PREV’s broader commitment to relationality, reciprocity, dignity, positionality, and doing no harm.