Youth Work and Youth Services: Practice example - Young Lambeth Co-operative
Adam Offord
Monday, October 10, 2016
- Lambeth Council has set up an independent "youth mutual" organisation to manage and commission youth work services across the south London borough
- More than 7,000 young people have signed up as members, and play an active role in the running of the co-operative
- It has awarded 75 contracts to 55 organisations and generated £1.6m in income
ACTION
A handful of local authorities have set up alternative delivery models to provide youth services in the last few years in a bid to ensure they can grow and become sustainable at a time where funding for youth services is shrinking.
Young Lambeth Co-operative (YLC) was one of the first of these. For nearly two years, the membership organisation has been commissioning youth services on behalf of, and in collaboration with, young people.
In 2012, Lambeth Council joined forces with young people and adults in the south London borough to find a new way of working. It was agreed that local people wanted more of a say over how money was spent and services run, and in April 2014, YLC was launched. Since April 2015, it has been managing, commissioning and evaluating services for five- to 19-year-olds (and up to 25 with a disability) under a contract with the council that runs until 2019.
Richard Parkes, managing director of YLC, says that a co-operative model was chosen over a staff-run model so that there was a "sense of partnership and collaboration" between young people and adults, leading to better outcomes for young people.
The co-operative's board is made up of seven adults and professionals along with a young person. There is also a steering group made up of young people, representatives from the voluntary sector, a local member from the council, a senior council officer and other professionals, which acts as the "engine room", says Parkes.
"All those groups meet every two months and they drive what the needs, wants and aspirations of young people are and what the emerging issues are for us to be funding services in the future," Parkes says.
"We have no direct provision ourselves and there are no youth workers that have been taken on by YLC. We have created our own new team and all of the organisations and providers that we fund have then employed their own youth workers."
The YLC has an engagement team that regularly goes to areas where young people congregate to encourage them to sign up as members so they can have a say about what services they think would be beneficial. They also make links with schools, youth offending teams, social services and use social media as a strategy to entice young people to join. There are currently more than 7,000 young members.
Laura Bassett, funding development manager at YLC, says that there are 155 organisations in Lambeth that are eligible for funding from YLC because they have completed a pre-qualification process. From these, YLC currently commissions around 55 youth organisations, including The Prince's Trust and Oasis Children's Venture, to deliver 75 contracts.
These contracts are to deliver "early adoption programmes" such as stay and play clubs, youth centres and adventure playgrounds, and early intervention and prevention services, covering 20 interventions that make a measurable difference to vulnerable young people. These interventions are delivered through children and young people-centred programmes such as dramatherapy, after-school sports clubs, and youth clubs.
Parkes says: "The journey of change has been that we have moved from a grant-giving to a commissioning culture with the providers.
"We have also moved to an outcome-focused culture with our youth work settings. So we have got a clear theory of change and we have an evidence approach demonstrating that with all our providers."
Parkes says that the two advantages of spinning out from local authority control have been the independence it has given the organisation to make decisions, and the ability to bring in new sources of income the council would not have been able to access.
The co-operative is now carrying out a consultation exercise to find out what services should look like for the 2017 to 2019 period.
IMPACT
Since YLC was created in 2014, more than 7,000 children and young people have been recruited as members across the borough.
Of these, more than 300 young members have become the most active members, also known as gold members, including trained youth commissioners and young assessors, steering group members, and YLC ambassadors and "champions".
A further 1,200 have become silver members and have taken up the opportunity to participate in face-to-face consultations, e-surveys, and other engagement opportunities such as media opportunities and parliament visits.
There are more than 40 young people that have been trained to become "assessors" and they go out on unannounced visits to all of YLC's voluntary sector providers to monitor and assess how they are performing.
Parkes says the assessors will then report back to YLC and make comments about how organisations are performing and discuss what other young people are saying and want.
Fourteen-year-old Aisha, a young assessor, says: "We go to different youth settings unannounced and evaluate the service. I used to be really bored at home with nothing to do but YLC has really broadened my horizons."
