As the What Works Centre for Youth Employment, Youth Futures Foundation believes that a ‘what works’ approach to the creation, curation, sharing and translation of high-quality evidence is vital when making decisions affecting young people’s prospects.
Youth Futures Foundation is set to launch a new funding programme in 2024 that will encourage and support the sector to adopt evidence-based ways of working.
A common challenge found across the youth employment sector, is putting evidence into action through sharing and translation. Simply providing information about evidence-based programmes or practices is usually insufficient to change what funders, commissioners or practitioners do.
Barry Fletcher, CEO at Youth Futures Foundation, comments:
“We want to understand how practitioners can effectively take learning from relevant studies and apply it to supporting young people within their own context. We look forward to utlising our Youth Employment Toolkit to create systemic change across the sector, by encouraging a ‘what works’ approach to the work carried out by practitioners and funders alike.
“A key aim of the Evidence into Action programme is to create funder behavioural change, by encouraging funders to fund evidence-based interventions. We hope this programme can help us to unlock the potential of creating wider change as a result of other funders and commissioners funding more evidence-based approaches to tackling youth unemployment.”
Using the recommendations from the Youth Employment Toolkit, ‘Evidence into Action’ will develop a series of focused funding and learning programmes to directly influence practitioners, employers, funders and commissioners, ensuring that stakeholders are supported to understand and enact evidence-informed change in the way that they do things.
Engaging with internal and external key stakeholders, Youth Futures hopes to build upon its existing and emerging evidence base and work with infrastructure, funding and commissioning bodies to broker new support for the sector.
Evidence into Action will seek to better understand, by working with stakeholders, how research and evaluation evidence can be translated in ways that are relevant to the context that stakeholders operate within. Working with practitioners to produce resources and approaches that help practitioners design support for young people that is informed by the best evidence available.
The programme will also provide time and support for funded organisations to implement evidence-based approaches with young people as a vital way to understand the benefits and challenges of putting evidence into action.
Find out more about the programme and details of how to apply to become a funded delivery organisation here.
