A1-Building social identity through peer youth-led creative workshops
Podium 1
11:00 AM - 11:20 AMTue
Podium 1
Children and Young People
Speakers
Dr Bibiana Chan
Founder
Community Flower Studio
he Community Flower Studio (CFS) offers a unique model of social prescribing grounded in social identity theory, incorporating all three tiers (Community Initiatives; Group Programs and Personal-centred interventions) of the recently proposed three-tier social identity framework (Haslam et al., 2024). CFS addresses youth mental wellbeing through community-led initiatives, group-based creative health programs, and personalised, mentoring-based support. At Tier 1, CFS hosts inclusive community events such as the Lunar New Year Family Fun Fair and Mental Health Month’s Secret Garden designed to foster belonging across diverse cultural and age groups. Tier 2 features co-designed creative workshops, facilitated by trained youth mentors. These group programs create psychologically safe spaces that support peer connections and cultural expression through floral art, storytelling, and crafts. At Tier 3, the Youth Mentoring Program offers person-centred support, nurturing leadership and participation as active co-designers and co-producers of CFS’s future initiatives. CFS actively invites participants to join as members, supporting them to find “a sense of us.” This identity-building process aligns with Haslam et al.'s hypotheses that social prescribing is most effective when participants (a) join groups and (b) identify with them. Our model provides social infrastructure that builds meaningful group membership, strengthens social connection, and delivers tangible wellbeing outcomes, particularly for culturally and linguistically diverse young people who may face barriers to accessing mainstream services. By embedding leadership into our facilitation approach, CFS cultivates a shared sense of purpose and belonging across all three tiers of social prescribing. We propose that community-led creative health programs, like CFS, offer scalable and sustainable models for embedding social identity frameworks in practice.