In February and March, the Bay of Plenty Regional Council connected with 532 rangatahi.

The Bay of Plenty Regional Council has identified the importance of youth designed solutions because it enables young people as the end-users to inform the creation of potential prototypes to improve a product or service.

Of the 532 rangatahi engaged with, 335 were face-to-face engagements, and 198 were from online activities.

Thank you all youth who participated in the activities that the Bay of Plenty Regional Council facilitated early this year. In the activities, there were four areas explored:

  • What do youth know about the Bay of Plenty Regional Council?
  • What is the desire for youth to engage with the Bay of Plenty Regional Council?
  • What are some of the barriers that stop young people from engaging with the Bay of Plenty Regional Council?
  • What are some potential solutions to improve youth engagement?

An analysis of the findings from both the face-to-face and online engagement found four key current challenges needing to be addressed to improve and create effective engagement avenues for youth with the Bay of Plenty Regional Council.

The issues are:

  • Lack of Visibility – all youth engaged felt that the Bay of Plenty Regional Council had no visible presence in their areas.
  • Lack of Awareness – most youth engaged were not aware of who the Bay of Plenty Regional Council was and what they did.
  • Limited Youth Engagement – youth perceived that due to the lack of presence from the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, they could not see how engaging youth could occur effectively. Acknowledging that it must appear somewhere but latently identifying that it was ineffective.
  • Lack of Trust – understandably, the above three issues led to an overall lack of trust in the Bay of Plenty Regional Council.

Youth also ideated potential solutions that will address the identified issues; those solutions were recommended to the Bay of Plenty Regional Council on the 1st of April 2021.

Those solutions were given the green light to be implemented, and they were:

  • An assessment of the viability of developing a Youth Design Group.
  • Communications tools to inform young people of what the Regional Council does.
  • Delivery of an innovative youth project such as a Hackathon
  • Scoping potential to deliver work experience opportunities for young people

All participating rangatahi went in the draw to win a family pass to Canopy Tours. This was drawn on 22/03/2021 and presented to our lucky winner Tihema of Rūātoki. https://www.facebook.com/boprc/posts/4250475658318...