Case Study: London Youth

One of the Centre's network members.

About London Youth
London Youth supports a network of over 400 diverse community youth organisations. With a unique reach to over 75,000 young Londoners, they deliver programmes with and through this network in every London borough and out of town at their two residential learning centres.
They aim to support and challenge young people in becoming the best they can be. Their vision is that all young Londoners grow up healthy, able to navigate a fulfilling career and to make a positive contribution in their communities. The organisation supports young people in developing the confidence, resilience and relationship skills they need to make these changes. They work with all young people, but place a particular emphasis on those who wouldn't otherwise have access to these kinds of opportunities.
London Youth has four key objectives:

• Developing, training, connecting and quality assuring their membership network to deliver good youth work
• Creating a broad and inclusive range of opportunities for young people (with and through their members) that improves their all‰Ûround confidence, character and skills
• Ensuring their expertise and on-the‰Ûground voices of youth workers and young people influence public policy, practice and opinion
• Being the best they can be ourselves: financially robust and a great place to work

London Youth's work on evidence and impactLondon Youth were already on a journey towards understanding and incorporating evidence in their work, which was a key factor in the Centre selecting them as an early adopter For approximately a year, they had been undergoing a natural shift towards evidence based practice, using the Catalyst Outcomes Framework (secured with funding from Esmee Fairbairn) to create a dedicated impact role for three years. This position holder has been actively involved in integrating impact and evidence in London Youth's practice. Such activities included:

• The development of programme design (Journeys of Change for every programme)
• The development of evaluation design (process and impact),
• The selection of common evaluative tools (London Youth Process Survey and Life Effectiveness Questionnaire) for use across all of London Youth's programmes.

In working with the Centre for Youth Impact, London Youth hoped to better understand how to incorporate evidence based practice, as well as explaining and introducing this concept to their member organisations: the start of their evidence journey.

London Youth's aspirations as an early adopter with the Centre for Youth ImpactLondon Youth feels passionately about the importance of evidence in youth work, an approach that strongly aligns with the Centre's mission and vision for the youth sector. In combination with London Youth's prior work on evidence, their work as one of the Centre's early adopters was intended to fit alongside their existing developments. Working with the Centre would provide further support and learning to encourage London Youth's learning journey. Noticing the lack of a current focal point within the youth sector for sector led discussions and development, London Youth were keen to see the Centre develop and remain as a sector led initiative. Through helping its member organisations understand and incorporate high quality research on evidence and impact, London Youth hoped to strengthen its evidence journey' and championed it across the sector.

London Youth's work with the Centre for Youth Impact
London Youth's engagement with the Centre involved numerous activities, this included:
Training: the Centre provided a two day training package that focused on developing attendee's knowledge of evidence and impact in the youth sector (e.g. programme design)
Action learning sets: London Youth's peers and organisations came together to reflect on and address current challenges within the youth sector
Validations: a comprehensive review of organisations or programmes' evaluation design and evidence against the Standards of Evidence
Research placements: the Centre provided London Youth with research placements to support their evidence and impact activities
Unit costing: a professional practical analysis of London Youth's services to determine the value of each component
Communication and support: the Centre and its staff were available to support London Youth with questions or difficulties they might have encountered. The Centre's website provided London Youth with resources, articles, blogs and wider discussions on the youth sector.
Events: London Youth ran two events: Learning to be sustainable' (focused on giving leaders of participating members the opportunity to talk about evidence based practice and sustainability) and No size fits all' (focused on connecting funders and organisations)

The impact on London Youth and its networkLondon Youth had a predominantly positive experience working with the Centre. They remained mindful that the Centre was a brand new initiative, with the pilot phase granting them an opportunity to test and refine the Centre's offer for future engagement and next-wave early adopters. This flexibility allowed London Youth to trial new approaches with their four participating membership organisations. Through the above activities, London Youth was able to fulfil many of its Theory of Change outcomes.

A closer look at these highlights:

• London Youth were able to lead four member organisations on the start of their evidence journey. They successfully supported them through the validation process and used their experience and sector expertise to guide them through unfamiliar territory.
• The Centre's trainings better equipped the member organisations to undertake high quality evaluation and provided them with useful tools that they have implemented (i.e. the Theory of Change model). This training succeeded in explaining unfamiliar terms in a fresh and easily understood fashion.
• The validation process has allowed them to put into practice the skills, understanding and tools from the training. Not all practitioners London Youth worked with were aligned with the idea of evidence in youth work, and thus required some convincing on the notion of validations. Generally though, most practitioners appeared to be proud of their work, and were keen to use the validations to promote their services, with three of the four organisations London Youth worked with having submitted validations.
• Through the Action Learning Sets London Youth were able to collaborate with other organisations and individuals within the youth sector, this provided them with a sense of empowerment and ownership of the evidence and impact agenda. The provision of a free and open space for discussion, combined with resources, enhanced London Youth's work.
• London Youth have demonstrated how they have taken ownership of the evidence and evaluation agenda through their successful convening of two roundtables. These events highlight how they engaged with the wider sector and cascaded knowledge beyond their network.
• Research placements and training provided London Youth with a new perspective on utilising evidence and impact in youth work. The researchers were able to quickly adapt to the environment and effectively supported the needs of the organisations by breaking down and clearly explaining the often hard to understand research process.

London Youth found the most challenging aspect of working with the model, was ensuring that their member organisations were engaged with the Centre. They found that it was hard to keep practitioners engaged through unfamiliar terminology, whilst balancing real world difficulties such as funding and delivering to young people. They acknowledge that this may be in part due to the Centre's need to balance their engagement across the youth sector (i.e. with academics and policy makers). London Youth recognises the response to this might be to give organisations the knowledge to formulate the right engagement strategies with young people, and questions to ask about their role in the youth sector. London Youth also struggled to engage with the unit costing process, with the underlying processes and methodology appearing confusing, and the transferability of the process to other projects remaining unclear.
Summary of London Youth's engagementLondon Youth sees the Centre as a relevant response to on-going challenges within the youth sector. They view the Centre's main strengths as being a good space to develop reflection, conversation and discussion for the sector, delivered through capacity building, placements and training. A critical success factor for London Youth is for the Centre to remain sector led, and influenced by practitioners' needs and questions - not policy makers' or academics'.

For future engagement, London Youth would like to see the Centre develop sector reflection, conversation and discussion further, whilst helping practitioners to develop research questions. They want the sector to be setting its own agenda, with the Centre working alongside current and future early adopters to make this happen. To this end, London Youth have recently secured further funding; and will play an essential part in the future of the Centre through their prolonged engagement.
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London Youth highlight three areas of interest the Centre might focus on for future engagement:

• Forming and managing organisational networks
• Managing and disseminating knowledge
• Managing the Centre's structure and maintaining its agenda