Youth charities urged to seek more collaboration to avoid closures

In tough economic times, collaboration can be the only way in which small voluntary and community youth organisations are able to weather the storm.

The deputy director of the young people’s division at the Department for Education, Gillian Hillier, last month told delegates at a conference that charities must find better ways of working together.

She warned that falling budgets mean that youth organisations will be unable to plough a lone furrow, arguing that a failure to collaborate could force many small charities to close, leading to a devastating loss of services and expertise.

“My challenge to you is to work together, pool resources and pool expertise,” she said. “Consider mergers where appropriate, and hopefully we will be able to build a secure and flexible approach to the future.”

Julia Cleverdon, vice-president of Business in the Community, says voluntary and community youth organisations might need to be less competitive with one another if they are serious about putting the needs of young people first.

She argues that organisations must club together to take a more “area-based” and strategic approach to services, considering the overall needs of a certain locality. Such an approach can be used to determine where demand for services is highest, which projects are achieving results, and where resources should be targeted for the biggest impact, she says.

For example, organisations may choose to use their resources to help finance a small charity delivering outreach work that is getting excellent results, but struggling for cash. “If an organisation in a sector needs help, why can’t it be the sector itself that helps it out?” she says.

Linda Jack, member of the Liberal Democrat federal policy committee, says larger national organisations must do more to support grassroots youth services in communities rather than subsuming them when they win large contracts.

Grassroots work
“Sometimes that can destroy a small service because you are taking away what enabled it to be a success in the first place – grass-roots work based on passion and relationships,” she explains.

“The government is absolutely obsessed with competition and thinks that the reason why a service may not be good is because there is a lack of competition.

“Competition may create better results if you manufacture baked beans, but it is not the same for youth services.”

Jack adds that heightened financial pressures are preventing local voluntary and community sector youth organisations from collaborating effectively.

“When resources are tight, you tend to want to hold on to what you have. It is a natural reaction,” she says. “But in a competitive environment, economies of scale become much more important and you end up with big charities taking over services.”

Another important area for collaboration is schools. Tony Gallagher, HMI lead for youth services at Ofsted, believes one solution for youth organisations is to focus on collaborating with education services where possible.

He adds that the growing number of academies could be beneficial for youth work.

“Clearly, academies and academy chains are far more autonomous and can choose to use resources as they wish,” he says. “That is an opportunity. But youth services have got to understand the lie of the land and the permutations of relationships. Because these schools are autonomous, it is quite difficult for youth services to adopt any one approach to building a relationship.”