Director’s Cut: Hope-Filled Approaches to Amplifying LGBTQ+ Youth Voices in Healthcare

Ever found yourself wrapping up a co-design session with youth, only to realize there wasn’t enough time for them to truly unpack the meaning behind their incredible ideas? Director’s Cut was born to address that gap.

Join us at IDC 2025 for “Director’s Cut: Hope-Filled Approaches to Amplifying LGBTQ+ Youth Voices in Healthcare.” This HYBRID interactive workshop guides participants through a structured framework of enactment and reflection, ensuring that youth perspectives—especially those from marginalized LGBTQ+ communities—shape inclusive, affirming healthcare solutions. Drawing on Barack Obama’s vision of hope as a social and societal blueprint, we will explore ways to infuse belonging and aspiration into the design process.

We invite researchers, designers, practitioners, educators, and policymakers who believe in the power of youth co-design. Prior experience with co-design or LGBTQ+ communities is welcome but not required. Diverse perspectives will deepen our collective learning.

To help us better connect with you during the workshops, we’d love to learn more about your background.
Please share a brief reflection (up to 50 words) on one or more of the following:

• Experiences or challenges in co-designing with youth with intersectional identities

• Strategies for translating youth creativity into healthcare or organizational contexts

• The role of adult facilitators in bridging identity and power disparities

We look forward to fostering an atmosphere of belonging, creativity, and, above all, hope.

Click Here to sign-up!

Co-design engages participants in shaping solutions through their lived experiences (Sanders & Stappers, 2008). Yet, many co-design processes lack robust methods for youth—particularly those who identify as trans, queer, or otherwise marginalized within healthcare contexts—to fully convey the depth and nuance behind their contributions (Russell & Fish, 2016; Schaub, Stander, & Montgomery, 2022). Existing work has explored co-design in healthcare (Ní Shé & Harrison, 2021) and with young populations (Vella-Brodrick et al., 2023), but there remains a pronounced gap when it comes to queer-identified youth, especially in healthcare settings. These youths’ intersectional identities compound health disparities, from experiences of stigma and discrimination to fear of non-affirming care (Russell & Fish, 2016).

Within our ongoing research, we recognized that standard co-design activities—even those incorporating inclusive methods—often did not allow ample time for LGBTQ+ youth to fully unpack the meaning of what they created. We thus developed Director’s Cut to add a reflective, storytelling component that ensures critical insights around identity, oppression, and aspiration do not get lost in the hustle of workshops. While Director’s Cut emerged to address needs of LGBTQ+ youth in healthcare co-design, the method is transferable to any context in which participants’ intersectional identities may not fully align with those facilitating the sessions.

Grounded in Barack Obama’s conception of hope as a collective, societal aspiration (Obama, 2008), this workshop aims to:

1. Introduce Director’s Cut as a structured approach for capturing participants’ perspectives and future visions during two different co-design activities.

2. Equip participants with participatory tools that honor marginalized youths’ lived realities and spark collaborative change.

3. Foster dialogue on how hope can drive co-design that prioritizes belonging and equity for all.