Trauma Aware School Village Oversight Committee - Flinders University

SAYF's 14 to 18 branch members serve on the Oversight Committee for Flinders University's Trauma Aware School Village project, a national multi-year research initiative exploring how trauma-informed approaches can be embedded across entire school communities rather than applied only at the individual student level. The project operates across multiple sites and brings together researchers, educators, school leaders, and community members to co-design and evaluate a whole-of-school village model for trauma awareness. SAYF members' presence on the Oversight Committee ensures the research remains youth-informed, ethically grounded, and connected to the lived experience of young people throughout the full life of the project. This is not a one-off consultation. It is sustained governance involvement from young people in a nationally significant piece of education research, and it is one of the clearest examples of what it looks like when a research institution genuinely embeds youth voice into how a project is run, not just what it produces.