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Understanding and improving our impact in young people's lives. 
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Dear friends, over the last month, the world has changed in ways none of us could have imagined. Our individual and collective worlds have changed in major, tangible ways and in small, sometimes invisible ways - all are similarly significant. We are all affected, though we know that the impacts are not indiscriminate. There are new levels of inequity, fragility and vulnerability now that we are only just beginning to comprehend. 
 
At the Centre, our priority continues to be on enabling all young people to access high quality youth work and youth provision. This, of course, looks very different now. We’ll continue to channel all our energies into this. We’re not at the front-line and this is where the focus needs to go first. But we’re still here.
 
We want to support those organisations and funders mobilising to be there for young people. We want to help in building the shared understanding of how to respond, both now and in the future. We still want to be thoughtful, considered and collaborative. We’re taking some steps in the short term to open up access to resources for those practitioners and organisations in a place to reflect, and also to refocus our longer-term work on the new reality. My colleague Ed writes below about our early thoughts on how this might look. 
 
In the meantime, we’re continuing to work closely with our Regional Network Leads and partners across the UK to adapt and flex our projects and the support we can offer. We’ll be doing some work with many others on collating data on the impact of the pandemic on both organisations and young people, and developing some of our quality resources to support online and detached provision. We’re also going to open up the biggest resource we have, which is our time – see below for more info on new online office hours. 
 
We’ve delayed sending out our newsletter this month so that we had time to draw together what we hope is a useful collection of reading and resources for the youth sector at this time. We’ll continue to do that over the coming months. Let us know if there’s anything else you feel we could be doing.
 
Sending strength and solidarity, Bethia  
 
We’re holding online office hours!
We’re offering online office hours on Thursday afternoons to support practitioners and youth organisations with their evaluation practice and continuous quality improvement cycles. We are alive and empathetic to the challenges and adaptations to delivery that organisations are facing at the moment, and it would be disingenuous of us to suggest that we have a stockpile of solutions ready to go. We are, however, committed to embodying our values of being supportive, considered, collaborative, and challenging and we will work with you to find meaningful, practical ways to use evaluation to support your ongoing delivery with young people. 
 
Book a 45 minute Zoom session by getting in touch with hello@youthimpact.uk along with a brief summary of your question or the thought you’d like support working through and a member of our team will get in touch to finalise a time. We’ll also be monitoring and reflecting on these engagements for our own continuous quality improvement cycles to inform how we shape our offer for the sector. 

Asking Good Questions: Insights from our March survey
Asking Good Questions: The Survey is a set of three quickfire questions designed to capture the opinion of youth sector organisations on all things evaluation, quality and impact. We usually release a new survey each month – however we recognise that, in light of the coronavirus pandemic, resources and focus are needed elsewhere so won’t be conducting an April survey. We’re thinking about how we might re-purpose the survey to understand the emerging impact of the pandemic on the sector. Read on to find out what we learnt in March.
 
Our inaugural Asking Good Questions: The Survey asked respondents to share their thoughts on evaluation – you can check out our findings here.  We’ve followed this up by delving a little deeper into evaluation practices, looking at barriers and organisational approaches. We know that not everyone gets as excited about evaluation as we do (!), and we wanted to explore your views a little further. We received 68 responses, which represents a drop in participation compared to February for understandable reasons.
 
First of all, we wanted to know what barriers organisations face in relation to training and evaluation.



The good news is that 15% of participating organisations have no problems accessing training and evaluation. Unfortunately, and discounting those who think there is too much choice, that leaves over 80% who find themselves up against a barrier of some kind. We see two main challenges here. Firstly, there is clearly some work to be done around how and where organisations access information, as 26% have reported difficulties in knowing what is available. Secondly, some of the responses point to a lack of ‘room’ and resources as a barrier to training and evaluation, with time and money cited as key reasons. Whilst the social sector is currently in crisis, we know that there will be some opportunities to come from this – lessons about remote training and learning in a time of rapid change could provide new and innovative approaches that may alleviate some of these barriers in the future. 
 
Moving beyond access, we also wanted to understand barriers to applying the learning from evaluation training in the workplace.



This question really got us thinking. Again, we can see a lack of space for evaluation in organisations, both at a practical level, with 22% of participating organisations too busy to apply their learning, and at a strategic level, with 38% finding it difficult to embed learning either through staff teams or existing systems. Fewer that 10% of participating organisations feel they have a lack of continued support, which is encouraging, but the fact that 60% are struggling to apply their learning successfully suggests that this support needs to be stronger. The fact that 28% report never taking part in evaluation training correlates with the spectrum of barriers identified in Q1.
 
Finally, we wanted participants to consider the evaluation culture within youth organisations.



We are really pleased to see that 43% of participating organisations actively make use of their evaluation findings. We believe evaluation should be a central tenet of the systems, cultures and processes of youth organisations, to help them to understand where they are creating and contributing to change,  and how they can keep pushing up quality. We exist to help you develop your approach to evaluation, but we also understand the nature of funding, and the sector more broadly, which is why some of the figures above aren’t surprising. With 24% feeling pressure to demonstrate that provision ‘works’, and a further 21% purely undertaking evaluation for reporting purposes, it is clear that in a lot of cases, evaluation is still driven by external factors as opposed to the internal, intrinsic value it offers.
 
These questions reflect our mission: to offer leadership across the youth sector in the evidence and impact debate and drive meaningful evaluation across youth work and provision for young people. For us, this starts with a commitment from across the sector about how we should evaluate, learn and improve our work with and for young people. These responses reflect where we are as an organisation, as much as where you are – and there is more work to be done around the evaluation agenda at both ends.
 

Our Thoughts


In this section of the newsletter, our team members set out what’s currently occupying their thoughts. This month, Director of Practice Development, Ed Anderton thinks about responding, fast and slow in the current climate.
 
These past few weeks have seen the youth sector react incredibly fast to the changing context in which we collectively find ourselves. With youth centres and services closed, and detached youth work highly constrained by social distancing, the vast majority of interactions between skilled youth practitioners and the young people they support has moved online. This looks likely to continue for several months.
 
Youth infrastructure bodies have also mobilised quickly - NYA, UK Youth and The Mix’s collaborative effort to set up the Youth Work Support website provides a central point of guidance and support for practitioners to share their expertise and experiences in adapting to a very different and challenging working environment. For me, this sets a template for how organisations in supporting roles need to make their contributions: through working together, connecting the field to knowledge and insight, coordinating and consolidating good practice, and sharing learning as we go.
 
As specialists in learning, evaluation and continuous improvement, we have been very conscious that - in most cases - the contribution we can make has not been the immediate priority. We have spent the past few weeks listening to the practitioners already working with us, conferring with our partners and funders, and planning how we can adapt our work to better fit the needs of the sector, now and into a hazy future. 
 
In some cases, organisations have asked that we carry on working with them as planned: with direct delivery closed down or reduced, they have more time to attend to reflection, learning and planning. For many, this is not the case and what felt like useful improvement or evaluation priorities are being re-cast or simply paused. Hence, we have adjusted timelines where we can on our existing programmes, in order to create more space for us to provide the most meaningful, targeted support we can over the coming months. We are also working on making our resources available so they can access them when the time is right. In doing this, we are thinking both fast and slow.
 
Our ‘fast’ response for the sector is to focus on quality in online youth work. Drawing on our ‘Asking Good Questions’ framework, and the Framework of Outcomes for Young People 2.0 we will develop some simple, practical guidance to support high quality reflective practice in online support for young people. Some fundamentals will remain unchanged - high quality practice is that which enables social and emotional learning for young people in a safe and engaging environment, and taking a structured, intentional approach to planning, delivering and reflecting on your practice will support you to achieve and maintain that quality. 
 
This shift will clearly present new constraints and challenges - forging and maintaining positive relationships with young people looks and feels very different when all of your interactions (and their interactions with each other) are at a distance and in an online space. Different techniques and approaches to being ‘present’ will be required. ‘Safety’ takes on new dimensions. Given the resilience, energy and creativity of youth practitioners, however, we are also confident that insights and opportunities will emerge - lessons learned about how different platforms, activities and processes open up new and powerful avenues for youth work.
 
Our ‘slower’ response will be attending to, recording and integrating these insights into our understanding of the scope and nature of high-quality youth practice beyond these next few months. The youth sector entered into this crisis with a broad acknowledgement that there was an opportunity to further develop the alignment between in-person and online interactions with young people. Through this period, we have a collective opportunity to establish a rich body of knowledge and experience, which we can draw on and retain as youth centres and services open up again. A new and powerful integration of online and in-person youth work practice may emerge. 
 
There are also interesting opportunities to re-focus evaluation on early indicators rather than retrospective data. ‘Intended outcomes’ may need to take a back seat for a (long) while we collectively refocus on maintaining and deepening relationships, understanding and responding to need, and building opportunities for young people to influence and shape decisions. 
 
Both fast and slow, we will be working closely with our national and regional partners to ensure that whatever we do is easily and freely accessed - via collaborations such as Youth Work Support, as well as through an updated version of our website. We will also keep listening - incorporating as much feedback from young people and practitioners as we can - and providing regular updates on our progress. For now, if you have any questions, suggestions or requests - particularly if you would like to contribute to any of the above - please just get in touch: ed.anderton@youthimpact.uk.  
 

Ask the Centre


Over the last few weeks, we’ve received several questions about how to best evaluate provision that has been moved online. Firstly, we are humbled by the fact that so many of you have turned to us for guidance. We’re learning alongside you during this period, however there are some evaluation questions and approaches that we think are particularly relevant now.
 
Here’s one of the questions that we’ve been asked, and our response.
 
“We’ve moved as much of our work with young people as we can online, how should we be evaluating to make sure that we’re still collecting data on young people’s outcomes?”
 
Outcomes measurement is going to be particularly challenging to do meaningfully right now. For the most part, we wouldn’t recommend focussing your evaluation resources on answering questions pertaining to outcomes during this period.
 
Here are a few reasons why:
  • Your service was likely originally designed under the assumption that the context you’re working in would be stable, or at least predictable;
  • Mechanisms of change that may have been well understood and attended to in-person might not be relevant, or possible, online; and
  • The needs that young people are experiencing at the moment are likely to be different than those they presented at the start of your relationship with them. 
As we’re adapting to the ‘new normal’, and learning as we go, it’s an excellent time to focus evaluation on answering foundational questions such as:
  • Who is engaging with you, and why?
  • What exactly are you doing?
  • What do young people think about what you do?
While the COVID-19 related disruptions bring many challenges, there is also a great ‘test and learn’ opportunity as provision is moved online. By focussing evaluation on the questions listed above, rather than on outcomes for young people, we can learn deeply about the potential for online youth provision, what constitute high-quality experiences, and how it might be continued after we stop practising enforced social distancing.
 
For more guidance on using evaluation to support the delivery of your service and relationships with young people while working, we recommend reading these blogs.
 
Last week, NCVO shared a reflection on evaluating under fire, sharing three clear and practical steps that organisations can take to flex their evaluation approaches in order to meet the needs of their users.
 
This concise blog post also talks about why it’s important to (systematically) capture learning now, sharing a proposed framework for doing so through weekly 30 minute ‘what did you learn?’ conversations with a nominated COVID-19 Learning Log Keeper.
                  
Evaluation Support Scotland has also brought together guidance and a number of free and adaptable tools that can be used for simple, responsive evaluation.
 

What we're reading


We’ve curated a slightly longer round-up this month, bringing together additional resources across a number of themes to go alongside those already shared above. We hope that these are useful and relevant to your work and we will be drawing on them ourselves as we develop our own response as Ed described in Our Thoughts.
 
Digital youth work
Coyote magazine previously shared a digestible and helpful exploration of some of the challenges and opportunities associated with digital youth work. The article is from 2018, but the models and case studies are useful for anyone currently exploring online provision. We particularly liked the practical recommendations for ensuring that youth workers are supported with the ethics of online interactions.
 
The People, Dialogue & Change website has a range of resources for online youth work, including the recording of a webinar that created space for youth workers to share their experiences of digital youth work. The session, which was attended by over 100 people last week, is a great opportunity to hear directly from practitioners about how they are meeting current challenges. Recordings and notes from the webinar can all be found on their website.
 
Finally, this lovely, helpful checklist from the Search Institute is designed to support staff in schools and youth programmes to continue building developmental relationships with young people, while they are at home during the COVID-19 crisis. 
 
Learning, evaluation, and quality amid a crisis
As we have reflected on our own roles and practice, we have enjoyed two articles in particular. Firstly, we really loved this prompt to reflect on what we do, how we do, and how we see as evaluators. It explores what this means for our roles both in current times, and as we prepare for significant societal changes. We like its recognition of the need to be both flexible and intersectional: “just like Batman doesn’t have to choose between his utility belt and his bat-mobile, we don’t have to choose between developmental evaluation and the equitable evaluation framework”. You can sign up to weekly EvalCentral ‘UnWebinars’ (and catch up on past sessions) here.
 
We also found this thorough analysis of evaluation implications of the coronavirus emergency really helpful, from former AEA President Michael Quinn Patton. It feels grounded, relevant, and actionable. (Quinn, and others in this section, refer to Developmental Evaluation - if you aren’t familiar with this, we’d recommend this really clear introduction to the concept from Better Evaluation.)
 
This blog from Project Evident makes a case for continued investment in improving data sharing infrastructure, not only to shape and evaluate immediate crisis responses now, but also to support with ongoing evidence-based innovation and continuous improvement. Recognising existing barriers, it calls on funders, policymakers, evaluators, and practitioners to take action. The article is from the US, but we feel that the essence is just as applicable to the UK context.
 
Building on some of the recommendations above, one example of ‘responsive’ evaluation in action is a research centre at the University of Cumbria, where a team are seeking people's personal experiences of living through covid-19, in a bid to support communities physically and psychologically once the peak of the pandemic has passed. Research will focus on the lived experiences of people in Cumbria initially, with the possibility of expanding nationally later on.
 
Karen Pittman from the US-based Forum for Youth Investment also asks ‘what happens when out-of-school time is all the time?’, presenting an opportunity to bolster connections between different organisations working with young people. She advocates for “universal definitions of learning setting quality that reflect the lessons learned during the hiatus: relationships matter, safety and belonging matter, attention to individual needs matters, rich, rigorous, relevant content matters, and last but not least, opportunities to act and reflect in ways that strengthen young people’s skills and abilities to be confident, competent advocates for themselves and their communities matter.” We are looking forward to building on this call-to-action, in the online-focussed work that Ed introduces above.
 
In the spirit of collaboration and data sharing, 360 Giving have also launched a tracker on covid-19 response grants, based on data published by UK grant makers in the 360Giving Data Standard.
 
Impact on young people and communities
A number of articles have highlighted that the current pandemic will only exacerbate existing issues of inequity among communities. Off the back of a roundtable attended by teachers, school leaders, youth sector practitioners and policy makers, The Centre for Education and Youth and Ambition Institute have published this report exploring some of the pandemic’s less obvious implications, in particular where these disproportionately impact on our most vulnerable pupils. It includes a really helpful summary of 15 ‘Ideas for Action’ in supporting vulnerable young people through COVID-19 across: outreach, wellbeing, and safeguarding; resources and curriculum; and the workforce.
 
brand new position paper from #CharitySoWhite, which sits alongside ongoing mapping of the charity sector's response to COVID-19, outlines the impact of the crisis on BAME communities, key areas for coordinated action, and principles to be used in response plans. It emphasises that the pandemic is not a social equaliser and provides an overview of the risks and impact of the crisis on racial inequalities within the UK.
 
The Children’s Commissioner for England has released a series of briefings and resources relating to COVID-19 and children; focusing on domestic abusemental health, a parliamentary request for additional safeguards to ensure that children’s rights and best interests are always upheld, and a call to action for volunteers to support society’s most vulnerable children. 
 
Following a conversation with Inspirechilli’s Team, Young People in London, Colin Falconer reflects on what a return to ‘normal’ could mean, and how “some young people are already used to being thrifty and resilient in the face of challenges, are able to adapt, be empathetic to others in need, and eager to think ahead about the bigger picture beyond the moment”. He sets out that “the sooner we make sharing power with young people commonplace, the better for all of us.” We agree.
 
This short blog from Torsten Bellin the Guardian also links to really useful and very recent research on young people in the labour market.
 
Finally, in a time where many organisations and individuals are finding their timeline for making decisions cut significantly short, we found the five principles outlined in this article from McKinsey & Company on ‘decision making in corona times’ helpful. We will be taking heed, embracing them, and learning as we go.
 

Network News and Events


This section has been suspended whilst social distancing is in place. We’re continuing to work closely with our Regional Network Leads to understand how they’d like to work over the coming months. 
 
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