Paul Yuzyk Youth Initiative for Multiculturalism
A Department of Canadian Heritage Micro-Grant Experiment
Racism and discrimination are complex issues, and government doesn’t have all the answers. So what happens when the Government engages Canada’s youth to seek their insight? The Department of Canadian Heritage launched a youth micro-grant as an experiment to see if this format provides for helpful youth engagement. Our early results are presented in this blog post.
Experiment — Background and Context
The Paul Yuzyk Award for Multiculturalism was initiated in 2009 to recognize Canadians with outstanding lifetime contributions in the realm of multiculturalism. In 2018, the Department of Canadian Heritage re-purposed the award as a youth micro-grant, to support the Government’s youth engagement efforts. Young Canadians were invited to apply for grants of $250, $500 or $1,000 to support community projects that advanced diversity and inclusion.
We are currently gathering feedback on the initiative’s impact and potential for scalability through an online survey of successful applicants and follow-up phone interviews to gather in-depth qualitative data. We are also tracing the social media footprint of this year’s initiative by tracking the hashtags #YouthandDiversity and #JeunesEtDiversité, which the participants were required to use when showcasing their anti-racism events and activities. Overall, our ongoing experimentation approaches over several months have been enriched by our collaboration with Experimentation Works experts and advisors. Our iterative experimental design experience has also highlighted many important lessons, three of which we’d like to share with you below.
Lessons Learned
1) No (Advertising) Purchase Necessary!
In order to maximize the number of grants given the relatively small amount of funds allocated to our initiative ($30,000), no money was used for advertising. Instead, we harnessed youth listservs and social media outlets to inform the public. The result? We ended up receiving more than double the expected number of applications: 70 proposals from coast to coast to coast! We just need to figure out what these numbers mean if we want to scale the initiative.
2) Releasing $250 or $250K requires comparable efforts and procedures.
Our youth micro-funding recipients needed to fill out time-consuming vendor information and direct deposit forms. Despite the amount of technical information provided, fund payment processes were slow (in some cases unacceptably slow!). Before increasing the number of grant recipients, the Government needs a more streamlined and youth-friendly process to ensure on-time payment. We would love to use payment by email.
3) Crowdsourcing social media reporting works! Better if you choose the hashtags wisely.
We initially asked recipients to post pictures, videos, or blogs featuring their activities so that results would be publically available. Social media reporting also saves us a lot of the bureaucratic work and privacy headaches. In hindsight, using the existing hashtags of our department would have been a better choice because it would have prompted both our communication branch and our followers to react automatically, thereby generating greater impact.
Conclusion
There is emerging evidence that micro-grants are a practical way to engage youth from across Canada on the complex issues of racism and discrimination. We were delighted at the response to our first-ever youth micro-grant. Please check out the hashtags #YouthandDiversity and #JeunesEtDiversité. We look forward to sharing our final project results in the fall of 2018.
Post by Department of Canadian Heritage’s Paul Yuzyk Youth Initiative for Multiculturalism EW Team: Chantelle Komm, Johnny El-Alam, Sai Prithvi Mynampati, Maria Belen,Tamara Girard
Article également disponible en français ici: https://medium.com/@exp_oeuvre
