Youth bodies unveil plans for sector collaboration

UK Youth, Ambition and the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services (NCVYS) are to launch a “collective impact project” to devise new ways that youth organisations can collaborate to improve outcomes for young people.

The initiative has been put together following a series of consultation events late last year that asked members of the three bodies to outline the key challenges they are facing and what changes are needed to ensure youth services prosper despite deep cuts to local authority funding and provision in recent years.  

As a result of the feedback, seven objectives have been drawn up to:
•    Develop cross-sector alliances to support agreed outcomes
•    Produce a “clear and concise” youth offer including a shared vision for young people
•    Demonstrate the positive impact that youth work has for young people
•    Identify “key players” to provide sector leadership in the future
•    Develop new business models to ensure the sector is sustainable
•    Improve access to new forms of income
•    Develop the skills of the workforce

Through the collective impact project the three organisations plan to create a taskforce to identify partnerships and merger opportunities to consolidate the number of organisations in the sector.

The first step in this was the announcement on Tuesday that Ambition and NCVYS have started talks about merging.

There are also plans to set up another taskforce to “explore and unlock social investment, trading income and new sources of philanthropy”.

The plans envisage a key role for the Centre for Youth Impact, which organisers want to provide evidence on what youth service interventions work best. Figures from the private, public and voluntary sectors will also be appointed to “champion” the agenda.

Presenting the findings to youth work leaders at an event in central London on Tuesday evening, UK Youth chief executive Anna Smee said: “We have worked very hard over the last few months to try and come up with a collective view of what the sector needs and some actions around how we plan to move that forward.

“We haven’t got a perfect solution; this is very much just the beginning of conversations that we’d like you all to take part in and engage with us on, and so we are putting some ideas out there to provoke thoughts, debate and discussion.

"We accept many of you may disagree about how it should be done but there comes a point when as a sector we need to stand up and say this is what we believe in and here is a starting point of how we are going to achieve it.

“Essentially the key thing was there needs to be cross-sector working and that’s not just within youth sector charities but also the private sector, government, and other charitable organisations – how we bring them together and make the best of what each of those sectors knows so we can be better at what we do.”