Social action: Step Up To Serve fails to reach most disadvantaged young people
Fiona Simpson
Tuesday, November 24, 2020
As the government’s flagship youth social action initiative Step Up To Serve prepares to close, figures show participation among disadvantaged young people has fallen, prompting questions over its effectiveness.
“Young people are the people that will help us ‘build back better’,” says Charlotte Hill, chief executive of social action charity Step Up To Serve, as she reflects on the work of the government-backed organisation and its #iWill campaign as it prepares to wind down in December.
Based on former Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans for a “decade of social action”, Step Up To Serve launched in 2013 with the aim of doubling the number of young people participating in social action by 2020. It had the backing of cross-party politicians and was championed by the Prince of Wales.
However, as Hill puts it “if anyone had told us eight years ago what we had to face, I think we’d have to go and lie in a dark room” adding that due to huge national and global events including the Covid-19 pandemic, Brexit and the impact of austerity, “it is an incredibly hard time to be a young person”.
Here, youth work experts discuss whether the government initiative, which has cost £64m over its lifetime, has delivered enough for social action.
Participation
Step Up To Serve was set up with plans to increase participation in social action among young people from 30 per cent in 2013 to 60 per cent by the end of the decade.
In 2016, the organisation launched its #iWill campaign to which the government and the Big Lottery Community Fund each pledged £20m.
The funding, which was released in waves and buoyed by match funding by partner organisations including the Pears Foundation and Comic Relief, aimed to get young people involved in volunteering activities including those from marginalised backgrounds and low socio-economic areas.
The fund initially aimed to give small grants to 43 “partners” across England to enable social action to happen on a local level before expanding UK-wide.
However, the latest National Youth Social Action survey, conducted by Ipsos MORI, found that participation in social action has dropped from 59 per cent in 2015 to 53 per cent in 2019, while participation in meaningful social action fell from 42 per cent in 2015 to 36 per cent in 2019 (see graphics).
The drop comes despite 88 per cent of 10- to 20-year-olds saying they believed they could make the world a better place and 74 per cent saying they believed they could make a difference.
James Cathcart, director of youth participation organisation Young Voices Heard, says this may be down to a number of factors including a lack of recognition for young people helping their communities.
“There was a disappointing decrease in the proportion who felt they were recognised for their efforts from 60 per cent to 54 per cent and those who did tended to be from more affluent backgrounds,” Cathcart says of the most recent data (see box).
“Perhaps broader socio-economic factors, recession, cuts, lack of recognition, as well as a lack of opportunity, have had a cumulative effect, but this would need further research to test each one’s significance,” he suggests.
Achievements
Howard Williamson, professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales, praises the campaign’s efforts to meet targets saying “even the aspiration of getting half the youth population involved has, arguably, been achieved, but it is a tight argument.”
But Williamson highlights engagement of “harder to reach” groups, such as young men from low socio-economic backgrounds, as not having as big an impact as hoped.
The gap between participation in young people from deprived backgrounds and their more affluent peers has increased since 2015 when 30 per cent of young people from the lowest socio-economic quintile took part in social action compared with 45 per cent of those from the highest quintile. In 2019, just 21 per cent of 10- to 20-year-olds from the lowest socio-economic quintile took part compared with those from the highest, the National Youth Social Action survey shows.
“The significant minority of young people who have conventionally played their part have continued – and will continue to do so,” says Williamson, adding that “holding the line, in the current context, is an achievement in itself”.
However, he adds that a “stubborn minority” of young people “have proved a hard nut to crack”.
“There have been some success stories but we have learned that a commitment to social action needs to start in school, involving young people across the board,” Williamson adds.
Partnerships
Reflecting on the eight years of Step Up To Serve, Rania Marandos, chief executive of the #iWill campaign, cites the creation of partnerships as a highlight.
The campaign has formed partnerships with more than 1,000 organisations since 2013 including the NHS, O2/Telefonica, the Canal and River Trust and the Mayor of London.
Marandos highlights the NHS partnership as “one of our biggest achievements” which culminated in youth social action being cemented in the NHS Long Term Plan.
Other partnerships have seen O2 offer rounds of funding for 13- to 25-year-olds to help bring their ideas to life, using technology for social good and encouraging innovation through their Think Big programme.
Lloyds Banking Group has a “Lloyds Scholars” social mobility programme, in which scholars are asked to commit to completing at least 100 hours’ skills-based volunteering in their local community each academic year.
“It’s about young people partnering with these organisations to ensure that we are solving the problems we’re facing,” Marandos adds.
Anne-Marie Douglas, founder and chief executive of charity Peer Power, praises such partnerships in raising the profile of social action among young people, saying Step Up To Serve “has enabled many organisations to support young people to be leaders in social action”.
“One change the young people we work with want to see is for professionals and peers to understand more about empathy and co-production, to create system change in the health, social care and justice services many of them have experienced,” explains Douglas. “Thanks to funding from Act for Change, as part of the Step Up To Serve campaign, we’ve been able to pay young people to co-develop and co-deliver training to do just this.”
However, she calls for more “dedicated, long-term and flexible funding for youth social action” to enable young people to be paid for their involvement, supported pastorally and offered training and development for the long-term.
Engagement
Looking to the future of social action, Williamson echoes the need to offer an incentive to engage more young people at a time when the unemployment rate among 16- to 25-year-olds is 14.8 per cent, the highest figure on record due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Young people will often engage if they know they will get something out of it, be that cash, a free weekend away or a reference saying they helped in the community,” he adds.
A final pot of £500,000 has been made available by Step Up To Serve to continue to champion social action among young people through research and #iWill’s young ambassadors scheme which will run until 2022. However, the future of youth social action post-Covid is something on Hill’s mind as the initiative winds down.
“There are young people in their communities leading the way with social change, these are the people that will help us recover,” she says.
As organisations taking forward youth social action work, including the National Citizenship Service, veer towards volunteering at home, it is hoped that the final tranche of #iWill funding combined with eight years of partnerships building will create the platform to grow youth social action throughout the decade.
EXPERT VIEW
YOUNG PEOPLE MUST SHAPE FUTURE SOCIAL ACTION OPPORTUNITIES
By James Cathcart, director, Young Voices Heard
Findings from the latest Youth Social Action Survey show that while 88 per cent of young people still care about making the world a better place and 86 per cent agreed that it was important to try to make a difference, there has been a downward trend in youth social action activity since the annual survey started in 2014.
What are the challenges and what new year’s resolutions can we make for 2021 to address them?
Perhaps some of the answers lie in the detail and more encouraging findings of the survey and investing in the key “enablers”, notably in schools as part of a revived youth citizenships curriculum. There is a case for trying to match young people’s clear concern and care for their society with opportunities – and perhaps it is time to give them even more of a stake in shaping them.
Young leaders have increasingly been empowered by the #IWill campaign to have their say and their 2020 “Power of Youth” three calls to action: “Listen to us, Work with us, and Invest in us” are an excellent benchmark for the future by which young people will judge today’s efforts.
Although I fear Covid will have further restricted many of those opportunities for youth social action I’m optimistic that young people’s commitment to care will have new-found expression in creative ways to make a difference if their voices are amplified.
I look forward to seeing them being rewarded and recognised by their service to date, by being given new spaces to shape, lead and scrutinise the continuation of meaningful social action. Let’s hear their views in a youth-led revival for positive social change.