About The Network
STEPS (Stepping Towards Enhancing Policy Structures) is a pan India youth led, youth run volunteer group working towards foregrounding meaningful youth engagement in national level policies and programs focusing on young people, especially adolescents’ health and well-being. The group aims to identify key state specific issues and policy implementation gaps related to youth and adolescent health. The members along with the support from the secretariat devise appropriate advocacy strategies to ensure that programmes and policies addressing the health and well being of young people are more relevant to their realities and contexts and include rights based, participatory and accountable systems and processes. The need for STEPS emerged from the need to ensure meaningful participation and engagement of young people in policy making. The YP Foundation serves as the Secretariat of the network and provides necessary support for the capacity building of network members, policy engagement and sustainability.
Values
The network strongly believes in the following values that determine the actions of the young people in advocating for their health rights.
- Trust
- Confidentiality
- Empathy
- Youth-led Youth-centric – By/For Young People
- Rights-based
- Democratic
- Intersectionality
- Diversity/Inclusiveness
- Equity/Equality
- Transparency/Accountability
The Inception Story
The inception of STEPS (formerly known as Policy Working Group-PWG) began with the “Youth Insight Conclave: Informing Policies on Youth, Gender and Well-Being”, that was organised by The YP Foundation in August 2018, where around 170 people gathered from 17 states who are engaged with policy makers, international and national civil society organisations and technical agencies on issues of adolescents’ health and well-being. However the initial discussion on actualisation of a policy working group happened during the “First Convening of Youth Policy Working Group on Adolescent Health” held in November 2018 where participants from different regions of the country participated. It was followed by nine sub-national consultations to strengthen the vision of PWG and its workable strategies.The convention laid the foundation stone to the formation of a policy working group along with discussions to ideate and map out the formation, framework, and foster the development of strategies of the network. Eventually, consensus was built among members during the “SecondNational Convening of the Policy Working Group” in 2019 to replace the term Policy Working Group (PWG) by Stepping Towards Enhancing Policy Structures (STEPS).