Diana Skelton, ATD Fourth World UK National Co-ordination Team:
“I have known Gill Main since 2019, and worked closely with her since 2021. The first project we ran together was designed to collect information from children and young people in poverty and in care or adopted about family separation.
“It led to five written reports submitted to the United Nations as well as three oral presentations for the UN, one made by Gill.
“In this project, I saw Gill support a young woman who had undergone great trauma to build up her confidence in order to become a peer researcher involving new teenagers in our project. Gill also played a key role in the analysis of the findings, using enormous respect for young people’s exact words and choices while channelling this content into a format that could influence the UN.
“Our current Youth Voices project began in 2022 and led to a 15-page report submitted to the UN and an oral statement. This project was led by four peer youth researchers, thanks in enormous part to Gill’s support. It began with Gill and me co-training the young people in safeguarding and research ethics. Then we launched a series of peer-led focus groups to consult a wide range of young people. After months of online collaboration, in March 2023 we all came together for a residential session where the young people led a study group session on poverty, social work, and family separations. In this recent webinar, Gill spoke in dialogue with 19-year-old Kaydence to reflect on the Youth Voices collaboration. And this project will continue through 2024.
“In all of these collaborations, I have been deeply impressed by Gill’s approach. She has great respect for children’s voices and knows how to create the right context for them to grow into new responsibilities. Her enthusiasm, emotional intelligence, and deft methodologies have buoyed our entire project from day one. I recommend her as highly as possible”.
Dr Annie Smith, Executive Director of the McCreary Centre Society:
“McCreary Centre Society has benefited in numerous ways from our partnership with Dr Gill Main. For many years we had struggled to truly capture young people’s experiences of poverty and deprivation on our quinquennial population level youth health survey.
“Dr Main helped us to develop a methodology which captured youth’s lived experience of deprivation in a way that was meaningful to them. The Index we developed as a result has been widely used in British Columbia, Canada since 2018.
“Dr Main has also shared her expertise in engaging young people in research, and recently visited our Youth Research Academy (a group of youth aged 16-24 with lived experience of the government care system in Canada) to share her expertise and support them as they develop their own research projects aimed at improving outcomes for youth in the Canadian care system. I have always found Gill to be dedicated to social and economic equality, and to be a tireless advocate for justice”.