Summary: The ShoutOUT campaign is the second in a series of initiatives sponsored by Melbourne Legacy through grants provided by the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA). Officially known as the Young Veterans’ Project Phase 2 (YVP2), this iteration of the project was established to engage with the post-1991 veteran community living in Victoria. The goal was to gain a grassroots perspective of the issues and challenges that lie behind the data exposed in earlier studies. The insights developed by ShoutOUT build on those key papers including the Victorian Veteran’s Council’s Veterans Sector Study Report 2015, the Aspen Foundation’s Ex-Service Organisation (ESO) Mapping Report published in May 2016, and Melbourne Legacy’s Victorian Ex- Service Organisation Mapping Project published in February 2018. The ShoutOUT project team has also conducted a review of academic literature to further inform the development of key insights and to validate the approach. Built on the principles of Design Thinking (Kleahbahn and Utley, 2017), our key objective was to gain credible insights by engaging directly with members of the post-1991 veteran community. Establishing a position of credibility and trust within the veteran community was crucial for project success. The ShoutOUT team achieved this by faithfully sharing their stories and fulfilling our promise to provide honest and unfiltered feedback to policymakers, ESOs, and government agencies. This report is the completion of that very process, and our intention is to open a window into the lived-experiences of veterans and their families, to express their concerns and challenges and to add a human dimension to the wealth of data that has already been expertly collected and analysed over many years.
Abstract: This research set out to investigate the experiences of ‘grown up’ children from armed forces families, to gather their reflections on childhood and education, and to seek their advice to inform the current armed forces community, policy-makers and practitioners. The Service Children’s Progression Alliance (SCiP) defines a child from an armed forces family as “a person whose parent or carer serves in the Regular Armed Forces, or as a Reservist, or has done at any point during the first 25 years of that person’s life” (SCiP, 2017: para 2) and the Office for Students refers to this definition in their documentation relating to student characteristics (OfS n.d. para 8, see also OfS, 2020: para 11). In this research we use the term ‘grown up’ to indicate individuals over the age of 18 recognised to have reached the legal age of adulthood in the UK. This group of individuals are currently overlooked in research, policy and practice as the focus continues to be on serving members of the armed forces, veterans, and families, including school-aged children.