Policy Codesign for
King County Youth Mental Health & Substance Use Prevention
The Issue
Mental health challenges for youth are urgent and widespread.
Up to 1 in 5 young people in the U.S. have a reported mental, emotional, developmental, or behavioral disorder. Yet, about half of those with treatable mental health disorders do not receive adequate treatment. Adolescent substance use disorders affect over a million youth in the U.S. each year, but only 10% of youth report receiving substance use prevention programming.
About the Initiative
Better designed policies can help increase access to effective mental health care and programs.
Policy Codesign is a participatory, creative process to help people in communities learn from each other and explore local policy solutions to complex problems. The Policy Codesign process produces a policy recommendation and implementation plan tailored to a particular community’s context. Because the recommendations and plan are created by community members who have both professional expertise and lived-experience with the issues they are are addressing, Policy Codesign produces results that are both effective and sustainable.
What we hope to achieve
This project aimed to produce a policy recommendation and implementation plan for youth mental health promotion and substance use disorder prevention in King County.
How hope to achieve it
Our codesign team underwent a five-phased process to learn from each other and explore local policy solutions to these complex problems. Along the way, we solicited input from a larger advisory team and shared ideas with a community sounding board for feedback.
Final Report
Over 6 months, from February to August 2024, this Policy Codesign process brought together partners from government, service sectors, advocacy and community groups in a series of interconnected design workshops, meetings, and other opportunities to inform policy.
King County’s Departments of Public Health and Community and Human Services partnered with the University of Washington CoLab for Community & Behavioral Health Policy (CoLab) to convene and facilitate a design process across 4 groups: 1) the core codesign team, 2) a parallel youth codesign team, 3) a broader advisory group, and 4) a county-wide community sounding board. Throughout, relevant research evidence was integrated with local systems knowledge, lived experiences, and community perspectives to shape policy principles, and to ultimately inform the proposed policy strategy.
Read the Full Report, here.
Read the Executive Summary of this report, here.