These themes have been put together to give a flavour of some of the innovations under discussion at the recent Festival of Ideas focused on young people. We hope that they might also give people a sense of the kind of projects that might work with the Innovation Exchange under its coming Next Practice programme. However, this list is by no means fixed or exclusive – we will likely not be working in all the areas listed below and will certainly work in areas other than those described here.
Networked young people
The internet makes it easy to find both services and what people think about them. What started at sites at sites like Trip Advisor now happens at ratemyteacher.com, where young people name and rate teachers, whether they like it or not. These systems have the potential to create rich information for both young people and those who work with them. Third sector innovators are working to ensure that these innovations empower young people and strengthen services.
This area of third sector innovation is bringing together information about activities for young people, enabling them to share their own views about them and helping them to lead the development of new provision. The aim is to make information systems a powerful force for improvement, rather than a barrier to improvement.
Coaching and mentoring
From the growing use of one-to-one support within schools to Wii Fit, Nintendo’s personal trainer, personal coaching and mentoring is an increasingly significant element of the services offered to young people. While these approaches can be labour-intensive, they offer a powerful way to engage young people and help them commit to a learning process. Increasing recognition that this kind of support can be provided remotely and that people can be willing to provide it voluntarily means that it is of growing significance to innovators in the third sector.
Third sector innovators are looking at to extend peer mentoring among young people, use technology to help coaching and mentoring to reach further and find new ways to engage volunteers as coaches and mentors. Their aim is to avoid situations in which young people lack roles models or feel that they have no one to turn to for wisdom and advice.
Stuff to do
The stereo-typical young person would rather chat on instant messenger than engage in positive activities with their friends. In truth, this online time largely replaces television watching – there is still a need and a demand for ‘things to do’. In this context, much third sector innovation is focused on finding new markets for classic products. Third sector innovators are working to make youth clubs and outdoor education attractive and meaningful to today’s young people.
Some innovators are building on the decline in deference and growth in self-confidence of young people, framing youth-led activities that help them to change the world around them. Others are developing youth clubs around service experiences in which young people are already fluent, from cafes and coffee shops to chatrooms. All of them are looking to develop activities that are owned by young people and which they find exciting and accessible.
Learning and earning
Examples like Hoxton Apprentice and Fifteen have popularised both the notion of social enterprise and its potential to help to transform young people’s lives. By combining learning and earning, social enterprises at their best help young people in ways that are both financially viable and personally rewarding. Across the third sector, innovators are now looking at the potential of models of this kind to support more young people, whatever their talent or interest.
Some third sector innovators are explicitly seeking to build social enterprises around the talents of young people, as designers, musicians or security staff. Others are looking to spark entrepreneurship within young people, helping them to develop their own mini-enterprises or seeking to embed them within existing organisations to drive their development. What connects these efforts is the endeavour to find a new relationship between learning and work that helps young people to grow into adulthood in ways that are appropriate for them.
A place of their own
For today’s young people, finding accommodation has become more expensive and difficult just as some of the structures that help young people transition into adulthood are fading away. In response, there has been a growth in student-style accommodation and more young people are living at home into their twenties. The third sector has responded innovatively to this issue in the past, creating foyer model to support young people to live independently and models of residential volunteering, allowing young people to offer rent in-kind.
Today’s third sector innovators are continuing to probe the connections between where young people live, what support they need and what they might have to offer in return. For example, one approach looks at home-sharing, matching young people with time to care with older people in need of support and free rooms in their homes. The aim is to ensure young people’s accommodation helps them to live their lives rather than getting in their way.
Helping those left behind
Sophisticated computer systems and organisational practices have been developed to track young people and target those at risk of falling through the net. The indicator for young people not in education, employment or training has been adopted by more local authorities than any other. However, by their very nature, young people off the radar of public and third sector provision faces challenges to which as a society we lack complete solutions. At these margins, third sector innovators continue to do invaluable work.
From work to help young people to walk away from gang culture to work to identify and support victims of sexual abuse, organisations working to tackle issues that attract the greatest media attention still report that they struggle to find the support and dialogue they need to develop and grow their work. This disconnect is an opportunity for third sector innovators and commissioners to work together to tackle the problems they all face.
