Young and Curious

Project Overview

Young and Curious was a youth-centred initiative led by Pivot Collective, creating a space for reflection, imagination, and shared inquiry among young South Africans aged 18–29.

Initially supported through seed funding from Wellcome, the project evolved over time into a locally grounded and iterative core NPC programme, shaped by both opportunity and constraint. At its core, it brought together a diverse group of young collaborators through an open call, inviting them into a co-creative process rooted in their lived experiences and everyday realities.

Together, participants explored what it means to come of age in a context shaped by inequality, uncertainty, and possibility. Using creative methods (including mural art, photography, poetry, and storytelling) the group explored mental health and wellbeing as experiences shaped by social, cultural, and structural forces, rather than as isolated or individual conditions.

In this process, young people were recognised as knowledge producers in their own right, bringing critical insight into the conditions shaping their lives. Through creative and participatory approaches, Young and Curious created space for participants to construct and share their own narratives, while also questioning whose knowledge is typically recognised, and whose is left out, in conversations about mental health.

Public-facing moments such as Doodle Nights extended this work into the community, using art and dialogue to challenge dominant framings of mental health and open up alternative, more contextually grounded ways of understanding distress and wellbeing.

Our Role

Young and Curious was developed and led by Pivot Collective NPC as an exploratory initiative at the intersection of participatory research, creative practice, and youth engagement.

Our role was to design and facilitate a process that brought together research, engagement, and creative expression as a single, integrated and co-created practice. This involved working collaboratively with participants to shape the direction of the project, while creating the conditions for reflection, dialogue, and experimentation.

We facilitated workshops, creative sessions, and ongoing reflective spaces that supported participants to explore their experiences, develop their creative practices, and engage critically with questions of mental health and social change. This included holding space for difficult and often deeply personal conversations, grounded in an ethic of care, trust, and mutual accountability.

We also connected participants to a broader network of artists, researchers, and practitioners, creating opportunities for exchange across disciplines and ways of knowing. Throughout, the focus remained on supporting young people not only to express their experiences, but to shape how those experiences are understood and communicated.

As the project unfolded, particularly in the context of COVID-19, we adapted the structure and scope of the work to remain responsive to participants’ needs and realities. This resulted in a more locally rooted and sustained engagement, with an emphasis on continuity, relationship-building, and collective ownership.

What We Learned

Young and Curious offered important insights into how we understand mental health, knowledge, and participation—particularly in a South African and broader global South context.

One key learning is that how we create knowledge matters as much as what we create. In many mental health research contexts, knowledge is still produced at a distance, where young people are positioned as subjects of study rather than active contributors. This project showed that when young people are meaningfully involved in shaping the questions, methods, and outputs, the knowledge that emerges is more nuanced, relevant, and grounded in lived reality.

Related to this, the project highlighted the importance of challenging dominant frameworks of mental health, many of which are rooted in Euro-American, biomedical models. While these frameworks can be useful, they often fail to capture the complexity of young people’s experiences in contexts shaped by inequality, violence, and historical injustice. Through creative and collective exploration, participants articulated more relational and contextual understandings of mental health, ones that connect emotional wellbeing to social conditions, community dynamics, and everyday lived experience.

This points to a broader insight around decolonising knowledge: questioning whose knowledge is recognised as valid, and creating space for different ways of knowing to shape research and practice. In Young and Curious, creative expression became a way to surface forms of knowledge that are often overlooked, including embodied, emotional, and narrative ways of understanding the world. These forms of knowledge are essential, alongside traditional scientific knowledge, to build a fuller picture of mental health and wellbeing.

Rather than treating South Africa as a site where knowledge is extracted or applied, Young and Curious positioned it as a site of insight, innovation, and theory-building in its own right. The experiences of participants, shaped by intersecting forms of inequality, resilience, and social change, offer important contributions to global conversations about mental health, particularly in highlighting the links between structural conditions and individual wellbeing.

Finally, Young and Curious underscored the importance of care, continuity, and collective ownership in participatory work. Creating spaces where young people feel safe to share, reflect, and create takes time and intention. It requires building relationships, holding complexity, and recognising the emotional labour involved in this kind of work. When these conditions are in place, participation moves beyond consultation. It becomes a process of shared learning, critical reflection, and, ultimately, transformation.