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A new collaboration with Youth Futures Foundation to improve the lives of young people

We are delighted to announce that we will be working with Youth Futures Foundation over the next few months to support them in showcasing some of their work to improve employment outcomes for young people from marginalised backgrounds in England.

Youth Futures Foundation is an independent, not-for-profit organisation established in December 2019 with £90m endowment from the Reclaim Fund to narrow employment gaps by identifying what works and why, investing in evidence generation and innovation, and igniting a movement for change so all young people have fair access to good quality jobs.

We will be helping them to build momentum for some of their upcoming events and providing them with the means to publish and share some of their key data and findings from their extensive analysis portfolio. As always, we will do this by working and collaborating in the open, supporting Youth Futures Foundation to get the most out of the web and we will be encouraging those interested in this space to get involved - so keep an eye out for future announcements.

There will be three main areas of focus leading up to the release of several reports, tied to a parliamentary event in early September:

  • Data Gap Mapping (with the Youth Employment Group):  This work has two main aims: to understand employment outcomes for young people from ethnic minority backgrounds, as well as to identify where there are gaps in labour market data and research for these groups of people. YFF have performed extensive analysis of labour market statistics and will be publishing their findings in a report. We will help them to share their key messages on the web by visualising some of the key analysis on the dashboard and microsite.
  • Rapid Survey:  This report seeks to understand the factors that influence the labour market and educational opportunities of young people from different ethnic minority backgrounds, including how the pandemic and cost of living crisis have either positively or negatively impacted on young people’s choices and participation in opportunities. How might we use these insights to create better and more inclusive policies?

    To support the publication of this report in September, we will produce a brief summary of the key findings from this qualitative survey dataset as the data becomes available in August.
  • Labour Force Survey statistics:  For a number of projects, YFF have told us that their research often requires repetitive, manual processing of monthly and quarterly Labour Force Survey statistics. YFF have already started to automate this process to pull together various relevant data sources and visualise the key changes over time. We will be helping YFF to build on this automation and present these visualisations within the dashboard so that YFF and other researchers can see the information they need as it is released.
We will therefore support the Youth Futures Foundation in achieving their goals by doing two things:

  1. We will help YFF to publish their evidence and research base to support the release of several publications through visualisations, a data dashboard and project hub page. The dashboard will be hosted on the Youth Futures Foundation website, and in addition to this we will create a data microsite similar to our work with Leeds 2023, where we will pull together visualisations and dashboards, as well as appropriate research and standards. We will be working in the open, sharing all our code on an Open Innovations Youth Futures Foundation Github repository and will be working closely with YFF in the coming weeks to align our work with their upcoming events and publications.
  2. We will adopt our usual #RadicallyOpen approach, using our network to amplify impact. Our most effective way of getting things done is to ‘work out loud’, inviting others to participate through public collaboration. In addition to our project outputs, we will therefore also encourage others to get involved in open collaborative documents and working sessions, acting as a platform to share YFF’s work and engage with practitioners, policymakers and think-tanks who are interested in this data.
We will be posting updates on our progress on the Youth Futures Foundation hub page as we go. Our goal is that this initial work will act as a springboard into further collaboration with Youth Futures Foundation later in the year. We’re excited to see what comes out of this project and welcome anybody in this space to get involved at hello@open-innovations.org.