London Youth

Claire & Amy supported us on our journey to become a learning organisation. They’ve been providing us with top-notch evaluations that focus on use and bring in different stakeholders, including our team, to improve our work and impact. They also worked with us on bigger picture projects, developing an organisational framework with our team as well as a training series for our members.

About the work

London Youth supports a network of over 600 youth organisations across London. They distribute funding to grassroots organisations that reach vulnerable and marginalised young people, as well as provide training and support to build the capacity of the member organisations.

London Youth wanted to develop a programme-wide evaluation framework in order to improve their understanding of how they bring about change for young people and more easily identify where improvements could or should be made.

What we did

Shephard & Moyes are London Youth’s evaluation partner.  We worked alongside the programme team to co-design an evaluation framework and toolkit that enables high quality outcome data and learning to be captured in a more standardised and user-friendly way. To develop the framework we facilitated workshops with the team as well as consulted funders in order to better understand what approach would work best.

In addition, we have carried out a range of external evaluations on individual programmes that help improve the lives of young people, including; employability, heritage, sport and physical activity, mental health and creative arts. We support the team in evaluation planning, tool design and collection, analysis and reporting, and regularly facilitate Learning to Action workshops to enable learning from the evaluation work to inform future programme design and delivery. We also deliver training to member organisations, helping build the capacity of grassroots charities to carry out their own evaluation.

The difference we made

We have built the capacity of the team to better understand the value of evaluation and have helped embed a culture of learning across as well as within programmes. Each programme now has a clear evaluation plan and outcomes are measured in a way that enables the organisation to better understand the overall impact they are having on young people and youth organisations.