Our Thoughts - The Team

For this month’s ‘Our Thoughts’, the Centre’s team reflect on their highlights of the year and share their hopes for 2022.
 

A large part of what motivates me in my role at the Centre is the principle that sits at the heart of our work: that all young people need and deserve access to safe spaces, where they can build trusted and developmental relationships with other young people and adults. I’m feeling really excited about the next stage of our work on quality practices that can support this principle to be put into action. I think we’ve got a real opportunity to draw on lots of learning about the tools and processes that support ongoing quality improvement, as well as the culture and behaviours that will enable it to happen, and to make sure that we’re meaningfully centering and prioritising equity in our efforts. The other bit that motivates me is the awesome people we get to work with both in and outside of the team! Highlights from the year have included being reunited in person with colleagues, and finally getting to help deliver some in-person training with a fantastic team of practitioners in Leeds. Here’s hoping for more opportunities like that in 2022! – Catherine, Organisational Learning Lead

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My highlight of the year began twenty years ago. Aged 16, in a drafty workshop room, I completed my YMCA George Williams College Certificate in Informal Education. It was my introduction to understanding the values of good quality youth work and how practitioners can best build relationships with young people, which help them thrive. Over the coming years, my contact with the College continued through delivering and designing qualifications with them and collaborating as part of the global YMCA movement. Years later, on my first day at the Centre in March, I was briefed on the potential for partnership with the College. In the coming months, I have been deep in discussion about how we can achieve more together. The result: in November, we announced our intent to unite to improve practice in work with young people. I am delighted that the Centre's energy, rigour, and expertise will join with the experience and pedagogy of the College, united by our shared values and commitment to quality engagement with young people. Together, we can build a movement of quality support and improvement for those working with young people. – Tom, Executive Director

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Reflecting on the past year at the Centre, the growth and strengthening of our staff team stands out to me as one of our greatest achievements. Having only met some of them on a handful of occasions, I’m grateful for how kind and supportive they all are; how well we work together virtually, their tenacity for asking questions, their insightfulness, openness, adaptability, and penchant for learning - even in the face of uncertainty and at times, much turbulence. As we go forth into 2022, I’m excited for our merger with George Williams College and the opportunities (and challenges!) that await us! - Sarah, Resources Manager

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One of the most exciting things I’ve been working on since joining the Centre is our thinking about project development and project management. We have some great connections with Catalyst and we’re working with them to apply some of their and CAST’s excellent resources, such as 10 digital design principles and the 4 stages of the design process. Whilst Catalyst is primarily focused on supporting digital development in charities, this goes hand in glove with data and design, and human centred design is right at the heart of this. This chimes with so much of what we do at the Centre in its focus on being user-led and keeping user-experience central. Design thinking methodology is an iterative process, starting small and building and testing ideas (there are clear links here with experiential approaches in work with young people) and this is all helping us grapple with combining more traditional waterfall project management and gantt charts with agile project development. – Lucy, Director of Projects

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As someone who was once a young person who benefited enormously from my local youth groups, it has been a highlight in itself to return to the youth sector this year and join an organisation and movement determined to improve outcomes and life chances for current and future generations. It’s fantastic to witness the strides the sector has taken in its inclusion of youth voice and ability to listen to young people, an example of which can be found in the final report for The Listening Fund Scotland evaluation – a particularly great project I’ve worked on this year. I’m excited to work alongside our Young Evaluators Panel, who will be shaping our comms strategy and activity for our evaluation into the impact of youth voice in the #iwill Fund. You will be hearing a lot more from our panel over the coming year, and I’m looking forward to seeing their ideas come to life. Bring on 2022! – Hannah, Communications Officer

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Wow, this year truly feels like a whirlwind, and I can’t quite believe it has nearly come to an end! From a professional perspective I have grown in confidence and knowledge tenfold since January 2021, largely due to an incredibly supportive team guiding me (relatively smoothly) through a transition from Project Officer to Project Manager. I feel particularly grateful for the opportunity to be able to grow my passion for participatory work with young people, and firmly embed this in the Centre’s remit, through delivery of two new projects. The #iwill Fund evaluation, and the new ‘Young People’s Voice and Power’ initiative represent a step change in how we are approaching research and evaluation work, with both projects recruiting a team of young people to work alongside the project team on key aspects of delivery. It feels particularly exciting and timely for us to develop our skills and gain experience in working collaboratively with young people on research and evaluation, in order to support other organisations to do the same. My hopes for 2022 are that we continue to grow our focus on and commitment to youth voice, and continue to learn what it means to meaningfully engage and empower young people. – Jo, Project Manager

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This year, I’m especially proud of a project I have been working on since early spring, designing and coding a data portal that not only helps organisations collect evaluation data, but also supports the relationship between quality practice and positive outcomes for young people. The portal marked a new way of working at the Centre, challenging our thinking around quality data, and allowed space for honest discussions amongst our team and with our delivery partners. It was this collaborative approach that enabled us to build a portal that was fit for purpose and can hopefully be embedded into other areas of our work. We hope that the portal will facilitate mindful, quality practice which will be reflected in outcomes data for young people, and that, through this, we are able to positively engage with the sector in building the case that quality matters. - Josef, Data Lead

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Throughout this year I have enjoyed working with our regional networks and other partners on understanding quality in all its different aspects and facets. We started the year in lockdown and worked with practitioners to look at ‘what good looks like’ in the current climate, with so much digital and detached provision taking place. I was struck by the level of commitment I saw to ensuring that young people could have the best possible experience of provision despite all the restrictions and limitations imposed by lockdown. I was also struck by practitioners’ willingness and openness to learn from their experiences over the last eighteen months and their ability to think about what they would take forward into provision as it began to ‘build back’. I’m looking forward to continuing this work and to applying the measures that we have developed to look at the relationship between quality and outcomes in all kinds of provision, and continuing the development and roll out of resources to help the sector do this. – Steve, COO

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As we near the end of 2021, it seems essential to reflect on the Enterprise Development Programme and its many aspects. It has been rewarding to see our 2020 and 2021 cohort experience significant wins.

Here are a few that come to mind:

As of October 2021, 65% of participating organisations are generating trading income. Helped by the grants provided by the EDP, organisations in the youth strand of the programme are seeing trading income amounts in the five and six-figure range. This is a testament to the validity of their enterprise idea and their continued commitment to developing their project. 

Despite the EDP’s focus on Enterprise Development, young people are not left out of the equation of the projects undertaken by our EDP cohorts. Young people are involved in the Enterprise Development projects, whether as consultants, trainees or beneficiaries. Members of the EDP cohorts are not only enterprising in terms of income, but also in terms of enabling young people to take the lead and continuing to deliver on their mission. – Soizic, Enterprise Development Manager

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Having the opportunity to plan our first residential for the Young Evaluators Panel as part of our evaluation of the impact of youth voice within the #iwill Fund was a real achievement for me. I especially enjoyed the opportunity to work directly with young people, and I’m really looking forward to getting to know them better and collaborating further as we head into the data trawl phase of the project.

Supporting the reimagining of the Youth Programme Quality Intervention has been really valuable in understanding the merit of good quality practices in youth work. Overall, continuing to learn more about the youth sector and understanding the core purpose of the Centre feels like my biggest achievement to date. Looking ahead, I am excited for the next year, particularly the opportunities that the merger with George Williams College will bring, but also developing my research and project management skills and confidence in speaking publicly about the Centre’s work. – Zunaira, Research and Projects Assistant

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This year, I’ve felt privileged to work with such a range of partners across the youth sector - many relationships with whom have been new. We’ve worked with new delivery partners, new funders, and new community youth organisations. Much of my work this year has involved learning partnerships and evaluations. We’ve been able to lean into the variety of ways that insight is generated, shared, and acted on and have drawn on a range of evaluation and facilitation techniques to encourage us and our sector colleagues to be actively engaged with evidence and learning. In the context of the pandemic, organisations have had to develop relatively fast iterative cycles of learning and improvement. It’s encouraged a focus on the core and flexible components of provision design and practice and also outcomes for young people. I’m looking forward to seeing how this focus is maintained moving forward and how youth organisations continue to engage with evidence - that which is internally generated and externally generated. – Mary, Research and Methods Lead

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2021 has been perhaps one of the steepest learning curves of my life! I’m truly grateful that I work as part of a charity and a team that creates space for uncertainty, is always curious and partners openly with others to find new ways through. And in this context, a new realisation or insight is truly a gift. I’ve had many of these moments this year. I’ve been reassured and supported on so many occasions by the wisdom of my peers, and strangely, have felt more connected than ever before with friends and colleagues across the charitable sector. I’ve also enjoyed stretching my own knowledge and understanding about what we can learn from shared and open data. This has been one of my main highlights of the year. I loved being part of the Data Collective, and seeing our own work at the Centre develop as we began to build a platform that will enable practitioners to gather and visualise their own data. Covid taught me that when our direct contact with others is limited, we need to draw on other information to help us collectively understand our world, and particularly the inequities that so heavily influenced young people and communities’ lived experience of covid. Whilst I hope that 2022 shows us a path through and beyond the pandemic, I hope we don’t lose our learning about the power of collective insight. - Bethia, CEO