Lundy Model of Child Participation
A rights-based model built around space, voice, audience and influence, helping organisations make participation meaningful.
Laura Lundy / Queen's University Belfast
This page is a plain-English practice summary. It attributes the source field and avoids presenting the framework as Positively Devious intellectual property.
What this framework helps with
- designing participation processes with clear conditions
- checking that young people's views can influence decisions
- linking voice work to children's rights
Three questions it helps teams ask
- Have young people got a safe space to form views?
- Have they got support to express those views?
- Who is listening, and what can change as a result?
How to use it in youth and community work
Use Lundy Model of Child Participation as a lens for better decisions, not as a script. Start with the local context, invite the people affected by the work into the interpretation, and turn the framework into practical questions, design choices and learning habits.
For Positively Devious, this framework matters because it helps explain one part of the wider conditions around positive deviance: the relationships, opportunities, skills, systems and power arrangements that make uncommon positive outcomes more likely to be noticed and learned from.
What to watch out for
- voice without audience and influence can become extraction
- participation must be accessible and safe
- feedback loops matter after decisions are made