THRIVE Projects
Across Canada, THRIVE brings young people, community organizations, municipalities, and other local partners together to explore a shared question:
What makes a community feel safe for young people — and what can we do to help them thrive?
Understanding the local context
The process begins by engaging community organizations and other local actors to better understand the context in which young people live: existing strengths and initiatives, relationships, concerns, opportunities, and the spaces in which youth engagement is already taking place.
This helps us understand the local landscape and, importantly, consider how and where young people can be meaningfully engaged. Community knowledge informs the process, but it does not replace youth perspectives.
Engaging Young People
Young people are invited to describe safety and belonging in their own terms. These conversations allow priorities and possibilities to emerge from young people's experiences rather than requiring their experiences to fit categories established in advance.
Rather than beginning with predetermined definitions of risk or safety, the engagement creates space for important questions :
Where and when do you feel safe?
What helps you feel that you belong?
Which people, relationships, places, or opportunities matter to you?
What makes it difficult to feel heard, connected, or supported?
What would you like adults, organizations, and decision-makers to understand about your community?
What would you change?
These conversations allow priorities and possibilities to emerge from young people's experiences rather than requiring their experiences to fit categories established in advance.
Moving Beyond Consultation
Engagement should lead somewhere.
For THRIVE, youth engagement is not the end goal — it is the beginning of a process.
What young people share is brought into dialogue with municipal and community partners to identify concrete recommendations and explore opportunities for action. Depending on what emerges locally, this may help shapepolicies, programs, services, community spaces, engagement practices, relationships between institutions and young people, or other approaches to strengthening community safety and belonging.
This does not mean promising that every recommendation can be implemented immediately. Rather, THRIVE aims to create a transparent and meaningful process where young people’s perspectives are heard, considered, responded to, and connected to opportunities for change.
Whenever possible, young people should also be able to see what happened because they took part.
For CPN-PREV, prevention is about more than responding to the possibility of harm. It is also about strengthening the relationships, environments, opportunities, and sense of belonging that help people and communities thrive.
And when that work concerns young people, it must be shaped with them.