Centre of Excellence – Young People and Disasters

The Centre of Excellence – Young People and Disasters brings together expertise around young people (12-24 years), youth participation and disasters.

VU's Youth and Community Research Group and Youth Affairs Council Victoria (YACVic) are partnering to establish the Centre of Excellence. Establishment funding has been provided through the Australian Government Disaster Ready Fund.

About the Centre

The Centre champions the inclusion and active involvement of young people to contribute to all aspects of disasters.

We do this by:

Bringing together expertise around young people (12—24 years), youth participation and disasters.
Taking a strengths-based approach, recognising the capabilities and contributions of young people as active citizens in disaster readiness, resilience, and risk reduction.
Acknowledging that climate change is impacting disasters, causing them to be more frequent and more intense. Disasters are now experienced as multiple, compounding and cascading events. Young people’s futures are disproportionately affected.
Aiming to strengthen the capacity of relevant emergency and disaster organisations to engage and work with young people.
Acting as a clearing house for knowledge translation, commissioning, contributing to, and disseminating research with, and about young people’s engagement with disasters.
Utilising evidence to inform and improve engagement with young people and policy responses.
Championing place-based approaches, prioritising local community responses enabling young people’s agency as active citizens.
Advocating with young people for young people’s rights and wellbeing.

A group of students outdoors smiling at the camera

Image credit: YACVic

Our strengths & capabilities

Research & knowledge translation

We are a clearing house for knowledge translation through commissioning and contributing to research, evidence gathering and dissemination. This includes research with young people focused on engagement in and with disasters.

We enable new and innovative ideas and promote the scale up of successes through its partners, stakeholders and to build strong relationships across the youth and disaster sectors.

Place-based approaches

We champion place-based approaches that prioritise local community responses to disasters.

Our team endeavours to support and promote initiatives and responses that enable young people’s agency as citizens in their communities.

We work to identify local expertise and knowledge and make it known more broadly.

Climate change

In the aim of involving young people in disaster responses, the Centre acknowledges that climate change is impacting disasters; causing them to be more frequent and more intense; and that young people’s futures are disproportionately affected.

Our team engage with young people’s concerns relating to climate change and relevant evidence based literature, to inform the work of the Centre.

Capacity building

Our work contributes to strengthening the capacity of relevant emergency and disaster organisations to engage and/or to see the potential of working with young people.

This includes the sharing of knowledge and resources to inform services and communities.

Policy advocacy

Our team take a proactive stance in advocating for the rights and wellbeing of all young people to be actively involved in issues that affect them and their future.