This presentation will focus on how mental health, wellbeing and safety can be supported within creative approaches that engage vulnerable young people in co-design, youth participation and voice opportunities. These approaches will be demonstrated through showcasing two recent youth participation projects undertaken by Brisbane Youth Service (BYS) with young people who have lived experience of homelessness. The first of these engaged young people in the digital and content design of the organisation’s new youth focused website; and the second focused on an intensive co-design process for an innovative new youth & family engagement funded program trial. This presentation challenges assumptions that youth participation is hard and ‘dangerous’, by illustrating key steps that were taken to support young people’s mental health, wellbeing and sense of safety during the workshops. The presentation will explore the dynamic use of creative strategies designed to elevate and maximise young people’s capacity to meaningfully engage in the process, draw out and share their lived knowledge and expertise, and mitigate the barriers that stand in the way of authentic youth participation. The use of fictional characters will be discussed as a highly successful approach to establishing and maintaining a sense of safety and provoking rich learning conversations amongst groups of young people. Using the fictional characters enabled the young people to share their voices, experiences and ideas through the characters, therefore creating distance from their own personal stories and supporting their feelings of safety within the discussion. This approach facilitated young people’s participation and contribution to the process and elicited rich and insightful ideas, which in turn, enabled BYS to develop an end result that was profoundly informed by the voices and experience of young people.