Ndidi Okezie’s Post

Strategy Update: Accelerating Our Impact for Young People Back in 2020, UK Youth set out to address three intertwined problems: 1. The lack of sustainable investment into youth work 2. The limited cross-sector understanding of the difference youth work makes to young people 3. The limited opportunities to embed effective solutions As we cross the halfway point we’ve reviewed our progress, sector feedback, and identified our unique strengths in this work. We have decided to focus in on the top three objectives that have the greatest potential to accelerate our impact in the remaining months.   🤗 We call them our "A, B, Cs" A: Impact the lives of 1 million young people. - Through our youth development content, grants and outdoor learning social enterprise, we will directly improve 1 million young lives by 2025. B: Convene 10,000 cross-sector professionals and young people. - We will bring together youth workers, teachers, doctors, social workers, Government, police, business etc. Creating a unique learning environment to solve problems and scale evidenced solutions. C: Ensure 100% of staff are effective in their roles. - We’re dedicated to ensuring that every member of our staff thrives as we equip them to excel in their roles. We will nurture an enjoyable, skilled and cohesive force for system change. Here are two of the major initiatives that we’re accelerating progress on: 🌟The Joined-Up Institute: Our #Untapped economic report demonstrated what is truly possible if we would be bold enough to pursue it. The Joined-Up Institute is an immersive, multi-touch point learning environment, bringing a diverse range of cross-sector professionals and young people together to learn and scale evidenced solutions.   🌟The Youth First Programme: For years our colleagues at National Youth Agency have rightly! been challenging us to think creatively about how to bring 10,000 new youth workers in. I’ve heard the persistent calls for UK Youth to play a more proactive role in addressing the ongoing workforce shortage. We have been listening! We needed to understand what we were uniquely placed to do and our century long expertise in innovative programme development has led us here 💭 Inspired by the transformational model of Teach First 20 years ago, our vision is to develop an innovative recruitment solution that uniquely taps talent from entry level right through to graduates and career changers. We believe that the next few years are critical for #youngpeople. Now more than ever we need to join forces to sustainably address problems that will unlock the potential of every young person. We are in the setup phase for both of these initiatives and proactively seeking funders and collaborators who share our urgency to accelerate system change! 🗣️Are you in? My wonderful colleagues are ready! 👉🏾Kayleigh for #YouthFirst 👉🏾Jacob for #JoinedUp 👉🏾 Leo for all things #funding UK Youth to get this done!