Joined Up institute

A youth-led re-imagining of youth sector collaboration

What

Youth Co-design

Client

UK Youth

When

2024

Services

Foresight

People research

Breaking down silos in the youth sector

The last ten years have seen the UK youth sector stripped of funding and relevance, while siloed structures regularly fail to offer joined up and effective support for young people. To address a system challenge UK youth is designing a system solution -The Joined Up Institute. The vision (which is part of a larger suite of activities) is for an annual programme that takes more than 10,000 cross sector professionals working with young people through a process of challenging misconceptions, breaking down silos and helping to bring joined up support to young people around the UK. It’s an ambition on a scale never attempted before. The question….how to actually do it?

Envisioning futures of cross-sector working with young people

As a youth charity it was essential that young people should shape the design of the joined up institute. And with a wide open brief we brought in young people right at the start if the process, to develop an ambitious vision, values and ongoing co-design principles that would shape the future of the Joined Up Institute.

We worked with 8 youth co-producers from all over the UK in three days of creative workshops. In the first stage we explored their own experiences of youth work, used giant top-trumps cards to stretch their imaginations about cross sector collaboration, and told future stories about radically collaborative youth support systems. Then we designed concrete elements of the Joined Up learning journey and decided how young people would be involved in the ongoing design of the institute.

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The Joined Up Institute integrated ambitious values and youth leadership into the design and delivery of the whole programme

The future visions and values were the starting point of design decisions and a number of suggestions both for content and format were incorporated into the most recent conference session, where the co-producers hosted sessions and executed elements of the programme that they had conceived and designed.

In response to youth recommendations there is an ongoing youth advisory structure and young people have taken leadership roles in a number of design precesses, including an upcoming workshop series to shape the learning journey and curriculum for the coming year.

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