Authentic voices, real experiences
Author and co-founder of Inclusive Minds Alexandra Strick talks about the inspiration for her latest book, You Can, and why it felt so important to represent young people’s own experiences.
ALEXANDRA Strick is passionate about children’s books and has campaigned for over 25 years to make publishing more inclusive and representative.
She co-founded Inclusive Minds alongside Beth Cox and was Deputy Director of BookTrust, and now consults on inclusive books as well as writing her own. Her latest, You Can, demonstrates an enduring commitment to representation by giving children their own voice and a chance to take part in the creative process.
Working with illustrator Steve Antony (see interview on p.12), and with input from dozens of young people, You Can, is a life-affirming book that shows how everyone can achieve their dreams. It follows a group of children as they move through life from baby to young adult – each child is different, but each child learns “You can do almost anything anyone else can, even if you do it differently.”
Alexandra says: “You Can comes from that sense that children weren’t really given a voice or actively involved in book production. There are logical reasons for that – adults create them, adults publish them, sell them and tend to buy them. I thought there must be a way of
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getting children to genuinely engage in the process of creating a book and to feel that books really do belong to them. I’m not convinced we do enough to include children in that whole creative process. “It’s great that the industry creates such wonderful books and that it is now working to ensure all children can find themselves included in stories and pictures, but there was a nagging doubt for me that when we set out to create a book, we still rarely actually involve children themselves, especially from the outset”.
“I started by consulting with children on a very basic idea of ‘what would you say to your younger self?’ – a message that would be helpful, inspiring or supportive to their younger selves. That has become increasingly timely in the last couple of years.”
What began with a few children, soon became more than 100 with a core group of young people helping to shape the book. Alexandra says that their enthusiasm and willingness to share was a key factor in the book.
“The children were so keen to share their views – for one thing it is very empowering to be told your views matter. It grew from there and I reached out to more and more children and young people, collecting their messages and creating some sort of order for them. “They became very much a team of young editors – a lot of them became passionate about the book and stayed connected at every stage. They genuinely felt like it was their book – what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it. Very much about what they would say that would help them feel more confident.”
Inclusively minded.
That notion of empowerment gave Alexandra a new perspective on how adults listen to young people, and what
Spring-Summer 2022
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