Skip to main content
Open Innovations is winding down and will no longer be commencing new work from May 2026.

Exploring prospects for young people with Youth Futures Foundation

Last year, we started working with Youth Futures Foundation, an independent, not-for-profit organisation established in December 2019 with £90m endowment from the Reclaim Fund. They aim 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.

You can read more about our partnership in our intro blog post.

At the beginning of our work together with YFF, we laid out their long-term vision of a data platform to showcase a range of evidence and resources on what works and why for youth employment interventions. We agreed to start an initial phase of work focusing on YFF’s portfolio of data and research, supporting them to build momentum for their events and publications, and providing means for them to work in the open and publish data on the web.

This took the form of a data microsite, where we initially visualised and published some of the key evidence from research and analysis undertaken by the organisation. Throughout 2022, we worked closely with YFF to identify and present the key stories they wanted to tell in a series of reports, including: YFF’s Evidence Gaps meta-analysis of the data available on youth employment interventions; Youth Employment Outcomes analysis, as well as the Rapid Survey on discrimination experienced by ethnic minority young people.

We created a library of visualisation types to present some of the varied data sources that YFF are working with, so that charts can be created, customised, and shared on the Web. The data sources that power each of their visualisations can be downloaded from the website’s open repository, and we adopted our usual approach to working iteratively and in the open.

Building on this initial phase of work, we are now moving into Phase 2 of our relationship with YFF. We are helping them to develop reproducible analytical pipelines to automate some of the data processing and visualisations they do most frequently, to help set the context for YFF’s mission and monitor the changing employment landscape for young people. YFF told us that their analysis often requires manual processing of monthly and quarterly government datasets, and they spend a significant amount of time responding to internal and external requests for access and analysis of this data.

We have therefore been helping YFF to automate this process, pulling data onto an ‘external economic data dashboard’ to visualise changes in key data over time, so that YFF and their network can see the information they need as it is released. By reducing the time spent performing manual analysis and answering requests from their network, there will be more time available for the organisation to fulfill other work to achieve YFF’s mission.

Having this data in one place on their dashboard will help YFF’s network of policy-makers, practitioners, journalists and others to stay informed about the national economic context of their work, supporting them to answer questions like how the cost of living crisis is impacting on young people and their employment prospects, and the current state of unemployment for young people and how this is changing over time.

There are few places that visualise this data on young people, and there are even fewer sources of information on the employment landscape for young people from ethnic minorities. Therefore in Phase 2 of our work and beyond, we will be helping YFF to start fulfilling their long-term vision of a data dashboard that presents all of this key information in one place, starting with the most important openly available government datasets. By the end of Phase 2, the dashboard will allow YFF to supply their network with a self-serve for analysis that is most relevant and useful to them, allowing YFF to spend more time and focus on achieving its mission.


A roadmap for our work with Youth Futures Foundation in Phase 2 and beyond.
Credit: Open Innovations


Roadmap 

In Phase 2 of our work with YFF, we are exploring the key government datasets that provide crucial economic context for YFF’s work and presenting them on an External Data Dashboard. We are building reproducible analytical pipelines to automatically pull, process and visualise data from these sources:

We’ll also be continuing to help YFF to publish their work, impact, evidence and research base, using the data microsite to support the release of key publications.

  • The Connected Futures Fund: a £16 million fund to support young people to get good jobs through pioneering local partnerships. This page will present data on regions eligible for the funds, the areas awarded and provide further information on the funding process.

The Data Microsite is live and under active development. As always, we are working in the open so your comments and feedback are welcome. We’d love to hear from you if you have an interest or are working in this space. You can contact us on hello@open-innovations.org, or get in touch with Youth Futures Foundation on their website.