Youth Investment Fund Learning and Impact

The Big Lottery Fund is seeking to appoint a service provider to facilitate and deliver support to and across the successful youth organisations to optimise the learning from the investment and thus improve delivery and contribute to improvement within the wider sector more broadly.

There will be 2 strands within the learning: - Assessment of the impact their services have on young people. - Process learning about what works well.

Given the targeting of the YIF investment, it will be important to assess the impact on young people in disadvantaged areas and to understand what works in engaging and retaining them in youth services.

The learning and impact provider will work collaboratively with the funded organisations to define hard and soft impact measures that are related to understanding the role of open access youth services in supporting young people's social and emotional development, helping them gain skills and build confidence and supporting them to make the transition to becoming happy, healthy and economically active adults.

The provider will facilitate collaboration between funded organisations and agreement of a Common Measurement Framework (common impact metrics relevant to all funded organisations).

The learning and impact provider will develop the capability of funded organisations to measure their own impact on an ongoing basis and to improve their practice as a result.

The provider will develop guidance and tools to ensure sustainability.

The approach to evaluation should empower the funded organisations and the provider will facilitate ongoing collaboration and sharing of learning as the programme progresses.

As well as informing continuous development of practice amongst the funded organisations, the impact assessment and process learning will also feed into an overarching evaluation of the YIF programme against its objectives.