Published March 07 2022
In May 2021, Carer Gateway and partner Barwon Health worked with a group of young carers from Geelong to create TikTok videos about what is it like to be a young carer.
The project provides an opportunity for young carers to have volunteer work experience, develop social media content, gain social connections and creative expressions.
Barwon Health Young Carer Support Worker, Elizabeth McCracken, identified the need to partner with young carers as they are experts in their own caring experience. She identified a group of young carers with an interest in creating content for the social media platform TikTok. This partnership determined an effective way to communicate to other young carers.
A total of seven young carers were involved in a series of peer-led workshops run by Blue Bird Foundation (local community arts organisation), to develop the young carers’ ideas into tangible social media content. The young carers were able to produce five 30 - 60 second video clips.
In a focus group from three participating young carers, they agreed that being involved in groups like this are beneficial for the mental wellbeing of young carers. One young carer shared the value of being able to connect and share experiences across different cultures.
The Youth Arts Practitioner also had some great observations,
“Part of what I loved about supporting these sessions was learning about each individual person; their personalities, their interests, their hopes, their troubles, their concerns, and fostering a safe space in which they could freely share their stories, and both nurture and express themselves. I believe this project was very beneficial to these young carers, and I could see the joy, comfort, and sense of accomplishment in their faces throughout the process to the end.”