The two-day Leapfrog young people’s co-design residential took place in LICA last weekend and it was quite a thing – really quite a thing.

Facilitation, knowledge exchange, co-design; they all inevitably require elements of flexibility and responsiveness – of improvisation – but this event was of an altogether different order. It was not just necessary, but essential, constantly to turn and to twist on ever contracting and moving ground just to keep the young people engaged and to energise and animate the processes for them. The team had to deflect and absorb the many, unpredictable and highly charged points of interconnection between group members as allegiances realigned for reasons that were much more important to them than anything we had hoped they would focus on. But they did focus; they focused and they worked really, really hard on challenges that were difficult for them to both acknowledge and to address.