Young Start Fund Service Design 2020

The Young Start programme is the mechanism that the National Lottery community Fund (TNLCF) has agreed with Scottish Ministers for distributing Scotland's share of money from dormant accounts under the Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act 2008.

Policy directions from Scottish Government focus dormant account funding on children and young people.

This fits with the government's early intervention approach to tackle the causes behind a diverse range of challenges faced by Scottish communities.

The Young Start fund aims to help children and young people aged between 8 and 24 to become more confident, so they can realise their own potential.

Grants of between £10,000 and £100,000 are awarded for up to 3 years.

Putting young people in the lead is the central aim of the programme and applicants must demonstrate a strong alignment with our approaches.

The core principle of Young Start is that young people must be meaningfully involved in the design, development and delivery of funded activities.

Direct Engagement As part of this ongoing work, we are seeking to procure a service design specialist to support our direct engagement with young people from across Scotland.

The purpose of this work is to ask young people to take a look at the programme itself and to tell us where we could make changes that make it more youth led.

This includes potentially co-designing different areas of the Young Start fund.

We really want to walk the walk here and not just ask the groups we are funding to be more youth led.

The processes we're seeking to re-design with the help of young people may include various aspects of our customer journey e.g. our outreach activities, application processes (can we make the process easier or simpler to enable projects to have young people involved in applying), assessment of applications , is there scope for young people , decision making, external communications, grant management, learning and/or evaluation.

By involving young people in re-designing and co-designing the Young Start fund, the programme will hopefully come to reflect the thoughts, experiences and vision of young people in a meaningful way, but also enable young people to take a more active lead in applying for or deciding on Young Start funding.

We have the freedom to be bold here, we could potentially re-design a small part of the fund or the whole thing, we're keen to explore the options and hear what young people have to say about how we currently deliver the funding.

Not only do we want young people to inform what we should be funding, we'd love their involvement in or reflections on how the fund should work, how we make decisions, how we promote the Young Start fund and encourage young people to apply/get involved in the application process.