Innovative collaboration creates strong youth counselling

Anni Marquard, Head of centre, CfDP

It’s all about collaboration

We see a case of co-creating when Centre for Digital Youth Care collaborates with Danish municipalities on bringing their youth counselling online. If we are to develop something innovative and create something lasting, then we must open up and develop in close collaboration with municipalities across the country. At Cyberhus.dk, we have a really good hold on young people online, and municipalities and their skillful counsellors offer very relevant services for young people. When we combine these two areas, we are able to offer a completely unique and new form of youth counselling. Centre for Digital Youth Care assists municipalities in providing a fast implementation of online youth counselling by giving municipalities the tools necessary and equip them for handling a new form of counselling. Thereafter, counsellors of a given municipality are able to make direct contact with their young people, and this way, we ensure a more effective channel of local help for young people.

Contributing valuably to public innovation

According to a newly released book, Innovationsbarometeret (The Innovation Barometer, ed.) by Centre for Public Innovation, quality as well as efficiency are greater when private companies take part in the development of new public initiatives. Author, and Head of analysis with Centre for Public Innovation, Ole Bech Lykkebo, explains in his article “Private companies make the public sector successful” that private companies contribute, among others, experiences and skills different than those already present in the public sector, to public innovation. Precisely, knowledge-sharing and skills are some of the advantages which Ane Justesen, SSP consultant (interdisciplinary collaboration between schools, social authorities, and police) with the Danish municipality of Odder, highlights in her collaboration with Centre for Digital Youth Care:

“When you work as an SSP-consultant, such as myself, you have to know so much about a great many things in regards to youth culture, and in this case, knowledge of many things in regards to digital life, too. However, it may be difficult for me to keep up with all the information out there. This is where Centre for Digital Youth Care holds a lot of valuable knowledge to which we’d be crazy not to connect.”

Martin Bannow, SSP-coordinator with the municipality of Halsnæs, also experiences several advantages by collaborating:

“We had better sign up for the ride and benefit from the experience and knowledge of Cyberhus and the network being built in collaboration with other municipalities,”

Bannow explains.

The effect of our collaborations are highly measureable

The effect of the collaborative work between Centre for Digital Youth Care and Danish municipalities is also highly measureable. Together, we reach far more young people by working digitally with the municipal open, anonymous counselling (each municipality has their own open, anonymous counselling, ed.). The figures below show the number of municipal online consultative conversations on Cyberhus.dk:

Municipality	Number of conversations
Aarhus	52    (23 Feb. – 31 Oct.)
Ringkøbing-Skjern	109  (11 Feb. – 31 Oct.)
København	120  (4 Jan. – 31 Oct.)

An amazing energy arises by collaborating. This energy is created because we are actually lifting Danish youth counselling to an entirely new level. However, we are only able to do so, because we do it together. This way, municipalities and Centre for Digital Youth Care benefit from each other and collaborate to create an even better youth counselling in Denmark. Why bring the municipal youth counselling online?

Would you like to become part of our collaboration?

If you and your municipality would like to become part of our collaboration, become more visible to your local young people, and develop Denmark’s youth counselling, please reach us by e-mail @ anni@cfdp.dk, or tel.: + 50 50 24 13. This project is supported by: ]]>