Services for young people

Memorandum submitted by Inspired Youth

Case Study: ‘I Wunt Dare!’ – York, North Yorkshire.

For this submission I will be focussing on one specific example of an innovative youth arts campaign run by Inspired Youth in York. I Wunt Dare is a preventative Media Campaign focussed on helping young women make positive decisions around risk taking.   The campaign is devised and created by young people with an awareness of the issues.   They will be working alongside Inspired Youth to create a credible digital media campaign designed for their peers. [www.iwuntdare.wordpress.com]

Summary:

Placing young people at the heart of defining services is about empowerment, rather than traditional means of consultation. This way you get timely, relevant, credible and desirable services and the opportunity for life changing interventions for the good of the community.

1.1 The relationship between universal and targeted services for young people;

I Wunt Dare is a model of how targeted services can benefit and impact on a wider range of secondary beneficiaries. Working with a small group allows you to invest heavily in building positive relationships, particularly when working with groups who are seen as hard to reach. In this case we worked with a group of young women aged 14 and 15 years old who the school believed were ‘most at risk’ within their cohort. The project aim was to empower those young women to define their experiences of risky behaviour through a creative process and work alongside professional artists to present striking and relevant preventative messages to their peers. In this case those young people on the margins were presenting positive messages to young people in the mainstream.

2.1 How services for young people can meet the Government’s priorities for volunteering, including the role of National Citizen Service;

I Wunt Dare is an example of a project which encourages positive contributions by young people who are not the usual suspects when it comes to volunteering. For some young people the idea of spending you time volunteering bears no significance and is lost amongst the daily challenges and pressures of their lives. However, if the volunteering opportunity is about helping those closest to them, for example, ‘making mum proud’ or ‘making sure my younger brother or sister don’t make the same mistakes I have’, then it becomes more familiar, more achievable and more credible. The young women on the I Wunt Dare project have given over 165 hours of their own time so far, including their half-term holiday! This is a great achievement considering their usual attendance and attitude to being in school is considered to be very poor. When we first pitched the project to the group the response was "I wouldn’t dare stay after school!" (hence the title of the project), however by feeling empowered by the process, they did stay and have become a positive example to their peers and role models to younger children.

3.1 Which young people access services, what they want from those services and their role in shaping provision;

I Wunt Dare focussed on the young women’s place within their community in order to help, rather than hinder the shaping of the project. These young women are all very visible within their school and local community and are known for negative behaviour. Being visible and well known to their peers makes them perfectly placed to be role models. Taking their need for credibility and reputation into account the messages all had to be created by them, in their words. By harnessing their position in the community and by using media communication methods familiar to young people, we could deliver effective preventative messages out into the community faster than a worker could walk the streets.

4.1 The relative roles of the voluntary, community, statutory and private sectors in providing services for young people;

I Wunt Dare is a perfect example of cross sector partnership. The project was funded by a volunteering initiative (York Youth Community Action Pilot) and therefore was free to the school and the young women at point of delivery. Inspired Youth are a Non-Profit Social Enterprise who used the funding to cover the project costs using a Full Cost Recovery Model. Inspired Youth bring in local professional artists to enrich the experience for the participants which contributes to the local economy in times of significant worry in the arts sector.

5.1 The training and workforce development needs of the sector;  

Taking into account the current funding difficulties across the 3rd sector, small charitable organisations need to think more like businesses and learning to not rely on any core grant funding. This presents huge needs in terms of infrastructure and enterprise thinking.

6.1 The impact of public sector spending cuts on funding and commissioning of services, including how available resources can best be maximised, and whether payment by results is desirable and achievable;

As a non-profit Social Enterprise, Inspired Youth feel a certain flexibility when considering the financial landscape ahead, but our organization can only work well when there are healthy and flourishing charities and voluntary organizations in the 3rd sector. The ripple effect becomes a huge wave by the time you get down to community level. The Local Authority cuts have caused great anxiety and many organizations who work closely with them fear the worst. In terms of ‘payment by results’, the challenge for Inspired Youth and many of our partners is not necessarily how we maximize resources and maintain quality but how we can demonstrate the Social Capital we create and the unit value of our work.

7.1 How local government structures and statutory frameworks impact on service provision;

In York we are extremely well connected through our CVS to the Local Authority decision makers. We are well informed through CVS representation on various groups and can respond quickly to challenges and opportunities. This relationship has resulted in a good proportion of our business over the last 4 years. This infrastructure the CVS provides is critical to the health of the sector and the quality of service we can provide to young people.

8.1 How the value and effectiveness of services should be assessed.

First and foremost the value of services should be assessed by the end user; young people. Using I Wunt Dare as an example, the young women could reflect on their experiences in real time using a BLOG and social networks. By creating a professional partnership between the school, external Early Intervention agencies, Inspired Youth, creative industry professionals and the young women, the end beneficiary had buy-in from the very first session and could effect the received value of the project there-and-then, rather than feeling distanced from running of the project. The best way to show the value is through the words of the beneficiaries.

November 2010