What UK Youth is learning about evaluating youth social action 

If you are involved in funding, delivering, evaluating, researching or supporting youth social action in other ways, we know being able to measure impact effectively and understand what works will be high on your agenda. This year, we have worked with IVAR to map organisation’s journeys with the Power of Youth Charter – the research found demonstrating the impact of youth social action was highest priority for Power of Youth Charter signatories. 

In recent months, we have been sharing learning from our Youth Social Action programmes.

In this blog, – written by UK Youth head of network delivery Anna Alcock, research and learning officer Molly Dawson and R&L managers James Found and Anastasia Christoforou – UK Youth’s impact team reflect on what they have learned about evaluating Youth Social Action.

The impact team have been lucky enough to evaluate quite a few youth social action programmes over the years and are proud to partner with Volunteering Matters in coordinating the #iwill Movement. Together, we are proving and improving the impact of youth social action. From seeing what works – and making mistakes ourselves – we have learned a lot about how to evaluate social action programmes delivered across the youth sector.  

There is no question about it: evaluating youth social action can be complicated. By its very nature, youth social action is dynamic, flexible, time-consuming and will not always go the way we planned – often going better than planned. Youth social action takes place in communities, not classrooms, with young people who are giving back to society. In this context, collecting the data that really matters and making sense of it presents challenges.  

Through both EmpowHER Legacy and Inspire 2022 we were working closely with youth organisations to implement our evaluation, working flexibly to adapt our approach to community youth work, while also giving enough direction to capture what we thought was important and build our learning.

It presented challenges. For example, we knew youth organisations were already employing evaluation tools within their work, but young people are not always fond of completing surveys and no matter how hard you try, you cannot always capture what is important to young people with ‘hard’ measures. 

However, through all of this all we were able to understand and articulate the impact of the programmes and the benefits of youth social action for young people, youth organisations and their communities. See our EmpowHER Legacy and Inspire 2022 evaluation reports for more detail on the brilliant impact of these recent programmes.

In our evaluation reports for EmpowHer Legacy and Inspire 2022 we have made a number of recommendations for evaluating youth social action in the future based on our experience.  We’ve pulled out some of the key points here: 

The #iwill Fund Learning Hub and YMCA George Williams College both offer guidance and measures that can be applied across the youth sector to better capture young people’s progression through youth social action. Standardising how we measure outcomes, engagement and quality – and how these link together – brings rigour, consistency and comparability to evaluation. UK Youth is supporting collaborative youth sector initiatives seeking to standardise data and better understand the impact of different types of youth work, including youth social action. This year saw the launch of the Youth Work Evidence Alliance which brings together leading voices and practices in shared measurement to evidence the impact of quality youth work;

Providing clarity on the evaluation requirements at the outset of a project allows youth workers to understand the value of evaluation activity and gives space for them to challenge evaluators’ assumptions about how the evaluation will work ‘on the ground;

This can go some way to overcoming capacity challenges in the sector, carving out time for youth workers to share their insights and knowledge;

Youth social action will always create surprise moments that you will not have planned for. Embrace these moments as this is where true learning can come together and where evaluators can be a little more ‘youth work’ and go with the flow;

Our work supporting the #iwill Movement includes running the Evidence & Insights Collective, which is a group of young people, academics, youth practitioners and researchers who scrutinise existing evidence, to better co-ordinate our research and align our methods which steers our research.   

Through our partnership with Volunteering Matters on the #iwill movement, we are exploring the conditions that enable youth social action to thrive. Weare gathering different perspectives and triangulating evidence. For example:  

We will keep learning about the best ways to evaluate and research youth social action and are always keen to collaborate with other youth social action evidence builders, if this is you please get in touch at iwill@ukyouth.org

#iwill is a movement comprised of more than 1,000 organisations and 700 young #iwill Ambassadors & Champions from across the UK. They are united by a shared belief that all children and young people should be supported and empowered to make a positive difference on the issues that affect their livers, their communities, and broader society.

#iwill is empowering, challenging, independent, collaborative and inclusive – it belongs to everybody.

The #iwill movement is powered by young people and organisations. The #iwill Ambassadors and #iwill Champions, alongside organisations who sign up to the Power of Youth Charter, help ensure meaningful action is taken to support more children and young people to be active citizens.

The #iwill Partnership is made up of leaders of collective action groups working within and across sectors and nations of the UK to guide the #iwill movement. The independent #iwill Coordination Hub, hosted by Volunteering Matters and UK Youth supports the #iwill Partnership, #iwill Ambassadors and broader #iwill movement.

UK Youth is a leading charity with a vision that all young people are equipped to thrive and empowered to contribute at every stage of their lives. With an open network of more than 8,000 youth organisations and nation partners; UK Youth reaches more than four million young people across the UK and is focused on unlocking youth work as the catalyst of change that is needed now more than ever. To find out more, visit ukyouth.org 

UK Youth is involved in a range of programmes designed to help young people thrive, such as outdoor learning, physical literacy, social action and employability, including Hatch, a youth employability programme run in partnership with KFC. For more on UK Youth’s programmes, see ukyouth.org/what-we-do/programmes