To keep up with the changing mental health needs of young individuals, we've been working on updating and expanding our programs for schools, universities, and communities. This initiative is a result of careful planning and collaboration with both internal and external partners to ensure our programs remain impactful and aligned with our vision.
We prioritised understanding how our internal staff perceived our current offerings. This involved gathering insights through staff surveys (both full-time and part-time employees), half-day brainstorming sessions, and focus groups with our casual staffing pool, including facilitators and lived experience storytellers. These reflections were crucial in assessing the content and delivery of our programs, tapping into the wealth of knowledge and observations our staff has gained through their roles. This internal evaluation also laid the foundation for comparing internal perspectives with feedback from external stakeholders, helping us identify overarching trends in the later stages of the evaluation process.
"It has made me feel like batyr keeps my story alive, valued, heard and
that my story is valuable to others"
batyr storyteller
To complement our internal assessment, it was crucial for batyr to actively involve a diverse range of key stakeholders, such as school students, teachers, university students, university staff, and individuals within youth-oriented communities.
This also included a review of Student Insight Data, through surveys developed to identify characteristics of the student population currently engaged by batyr. These surveys assessed the effectiveness of batyr's current program suite in meeting the needs of secondary school students and identified a hierarchy of program elements.
The survey results unveiled an increase in the reported percentage of students experiencing mental ill-health from Year 9 to Year 12, with the power of stories ranking as the highest-rated element across all programs and year groups. Additionally, students with a lived experience rated higher in their perceived capacity to support someone facing mental ill-health.
The insights gathered have been nothing short of invaluable and will shape the way batyr engages in youth mental health literacy for future iterations. With that in mind, batyr is also committed to ensuring these relationships are maintained every step of the way, with steps toward developing a student voice group and clinical reference group underway.
Our Development and Delivery Team are currently in the process of finalising both the overarching primary suite outcomes, and the secondary content outcomes. When content development commences, this modular approach will include year specific “core” modules, with “elective” modules available for stakeholders to choose from that best reflect their student and broader community needs. This modular approach will approach stigma reduction through a multilevel approach that maps explicitly and implicitly to batyr's overarching Theory of Change with a focus on improving mental health for all young people.
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