London Youth shortlisted for Charity Awards
11 May 2015
London Youth has been shortlisted for The Charity Awards 2015 in the Children and Youth category.
The Charity Awards is Civil Society Media’s annual awards programme “held to identify, recognise and reward those organisations doing exceptional work in all areas of charitable activity”. The awards are now in their 16th year, and offer the chance to celebrate and highlight best practice across the sector.
London Youth’s nomination focuses on the work we have been doing on Impact, seeking to demonstrate that youth work delivered in a place where young people choose to go can increase confidence, character and skills, leading ultimately to improved life prospects.
Our nomination highlights the fact that a lack of evidence has made youth organisations vulnerable to funding cuts, and how we have worked with our members and others to try and show the value of what we do to support young people. Over the past two years we have developed ‘journeys of change’ for all our programmes – roadmaps to understand our goals, outcomes and the processes for achieving these, with impact assessment at the heart of the organisation. These involve people at every level from senior staff to youth workers, delivery teams and young people.
We recently published Good Youth Work Works? which summarises what we have learned to far. Our aim is to keep improving our understanding of the impact of our work at programme level and the great work being done by our member clubs, as well as how best practice can be shared across the sector.
The Charity Awards are judged by a panel of voluntary sector individuals, each of them leaders in their own fields. They assess each entry against ten Hallmarks of Excellence:
#1 Leadership
#2 People development
#3 Planning
#4 Innovation
#5 Enterprise
#6 Learning
#7 Impact measurement
#8 Effectiveness
#9 Accountability
#10 Sustainability
We are honoured to be nominated and hope that the nomination will raise awareness of the good youth work done by our members, and the benefit on measuring impact for the sector. We are running alongside two other fantastic organisations, whose great work with children and young people we recognise and value.
We’ll keep you posted on the results!
