IMPaCT’s Guiding Principles

Guiding Principles are essential to provide direction, navigate complexities and challenges and help guide all members of IMPaCT towards achieving our collective goals and purpose. The principles can help bridge the gap between lived experience and research experience of everyone involved in IMPaCT. They can help guide our own interactions with each other, especially when people may not agree. Finally, the principles can guide us if we are working on new endeavours where this type of engagement is new to us or others on the team. These guiding principles were co-created in April 2024 by IMPaCT’s youth and parent mentors and presented to IMPaCT’s leadership, mentors, and fellows for feedback.

Our Principles in Action

  • Mutual Respect includes respecting different kinds of knowledge, balanced powers, value of lived experience, and respect.

    • We respect different kinds of knowledge and provide opportunities for people to contribute in various ways.

    • We acknowledge the power imbalance that can occur when youth and parents engage with researchers and do our best to mitigate this.

    • We focus on our project roles versus our experience, titles, and education.

    • We value lived experience as a form of expertise.

  • Supportive Engagement and Ongoing Learning includes continuous learning, providing support, no dumb questions, balanced powers, and time management.

    • We provide opportunities for training.

    • We value continuous learning for all IMPaCT members by regularly receiving feedback and improving our engagement.

    • We offer compensation to youth and parent partners and reimbursement of expenses.

    • We recognize that a flexible approach is necessary to meet the needs of youth and parents who have other demands on their time and energy.

  • Transparent Collaboration includes collaborative, clearly communicated processes, and agreed upon expectations.

    • We communicate our processes clearly (e.g., compensation policy), offer flexibility in attending meetings by recording them, plan meetings ahead of time, and send reminders before meetings.

    • We ensure that expectations for mentors and mentees are clearly stated and that power imbalances are proactively considered and mitigated.

    • If a conflict arises, we will attempt to resolve this as quickly as possible in a respectful way that is acceptable to you.

  • Trust and Authenticity includes authenticity, trust, and open-mindedness.

    • Your feelings, values and opinions will be valued.

    • We will be honest, always.

    • We will work with all IMPaCT members to ensure that our guiding principles are central to all collaborations.

    • We will deliver on our commitments using open communication practices when changes are made in our plans.

  • Inclusiveness includes respecting different kinds of knowledge, self-love, passion, and equality.

    • We will collaborate with you knowing that every youth and parent partner is unique and brings their lives into this work, which can be difficult. 

    • We will actively seek representation from underrepresented groups.

    • We will provide information in plain language and refrain from using acronyms.

    • We will work with you to meet your accessibility needs and check in regularly to ensure that these needs are being met.