LifeLabs: bringing young people's voices to life through content strategy, co-design and collaboration

Challenge

As part of Barnardo's strategic partnership with IKEA, we set out to co-create a digital platform that captured care-experienced young people's visions for a more inclusive, sustainable future, and teaching them life skills in an engaging and relevant way. This is how the LifeLabs project was born. The challenge was to build authentic, youth-led content that would engage diverse audiences, amplify the lived experiences of young people in Care, and support Barnardo's mission to empower young people to influence the world around them.

Approach

We developed an online hub, for young people in and leaving care, which launched in February 2020. The hub now offers care leavers more video content and an innovative Augmented Reality lens operating through Snapchat. The lens is designed to create a bigger and better immersive sensory experience to help support care-experienced young people's mental health and wellbeing in the home. The videos covered practical topics such as budgeting, cooking, mental health, and wellbeing.

I developed the content strategy to promote LifeLabs, and led a cross-functional team to shape the storytelling structure, making sure that the final creative outputs both reflected the ideas and language of the young contributors and were on brand. My team managed the rollout of engaging digital content across web, video and social media, rooted in values of inclusivity, sustainability and youth empowerment. We supported 1,100+ care experienced young people through the project.