Youth Voice within the #iwill Fund

The College is the learning and evaluation partner seeking to capture the impact of youth voice within the #iwill Fund. We will explore the overall success of initiatives seeking to achieve youth voice, and key enablers and barriers to effective practice.

About the #iwill Fund

The #iwill Fund brings together a group of organisations who all contribute funding to embed meaningful social action into the lives of young people, made possible thanks to £50 million joint investment from The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support young people to access high quality social action.

The #iwill Fund has, so far, created a combined grant pot of over £73million and estimates that over 500,000 young people will undertake social action opportunities thanks to this funding.

Aims of the evaluation

The National Lottery Community Fund has commissioned the evaluation to seek to understand the impact of youth voice within the #iwill Fund, The National Lottery Community Fund Young People in the Lead Programme, and the DCMS Youth Steering Group. The evaluation will run until Spring 2023.

Youth voice is defined in the #iwill Fund as the meaningful involvement of young people in decisions that affect them and that influence the conditions of projects and programmes that they are involved in. This includes involvement in the co-design of programmes and services, research and evaluation, decision-making on grants and strategy, and in organisational governance. 

The evaluation will focus on understanding how youth voice practice impacts on:

  • young people
  • the #iwill Fund Match Funders 
  • organisations delivering #iwill Fund projects 
  • the communities where #iwill Fund projects take place 
  • the wider system and structures which support youth voice and youth social action

In addition to capturing the impact of youth voice in the #iwill Fund, we will apply this learning to best practice guides on embedding youth voice.

Key outputs for the evaluation

  • Report outlining the impact of youth voice on youth social action practice and policy
  • Report outlining the impact of youth voice on young people
  • Accessible guidance for practitioners and organisational leaders on embedding youth voice, grounded in evidence

 

How the evaluation will run 

Young people will be at the heart of every stage of the evaluation. A Young Evaluators Panel, comprising young people with experience of youth social action who will play an active role in the evaluation through: analysing existing evidence; undertaking primary data collection to bolster the evidence base; and supporting the development of the final reports and best practice guidance.
 

The evaluation adopts a Collaborative Outcomes Reporting approach, tailored to meet the needs of the specific context. This means working collaboratively with everyone involved in the #iwill Fund throughout the evaluation. There will be opportunities for organisations who have delivered #iwill Fund projects to submit evidence on the impact of youth voice and for everyone involved in the Fund to help analyse and influence our findings. 


 

Young Evaluators Panel

Meet our Young Evaluators Panel will be supporting the evaluation into the impact of youth voice within the #iwill Fund.

Call For Evidence

If you are involved with the #iwill Fund, share your evidence of youth voice activities and help us understand how young people are heard and influence decisions.