YouthPact

YouthPact is the Quality and Impact body for the EU PEACE IV Children & Young People’s Programme (Action 2.1)

What is YouthPact?

YouthPact is a cross-border partnership of four regional organisations: Co-operation Ireland (Lead Partner), Ulster University, National Youth Council of Ireland and Pobal.

For updates and more details on the project and partners involved, see Cooperation Ireland’s website:

The role of YouthPact

The role of YouthPact is to engage with the delivery agents and their partners in the projects funded under Action 2.1 to enhance the quality and maximise the impact of their work with young people by supporting a high-quality youth work approach, and nurturing a strong change and outcomes focus.

The Children and Young People’s strand of the PEACE IV Programme is a four-year initiative, which is managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB). It has the specific objective of enhancing the capacity of young people to form positive and effective relationships with others of a different background and make a positive contribution to building a cohesive society.

The delivery agents and their partners will work with 7,400 young people, aged 14-24, from across Northern Ireland and the border counties of Ireland. The projects will reach out to and engage young people who are most marginalised and disadvantaged; completing programmes that develop their soft skills and a respect for diversity.

The YouthPact Project Manager and three Development Officers will work as a team to provide a series of activities to support, train, advise and signpost staff from the delivery projects.

Development Officers will be matched with delivery agents and will meet with them on average 4 times a year, with a minimum of 3 support meetings per year. Support meetings may be thematic, small scale training events; skype or on-line support; identifying issues or barriers to progress; signposting and further participant opportunities discussed; problem and solution focused.

To date, Development Officers have had meetings with delivery agents to establish needs analysis, strengths and priorities. At these meetings individual support plans have been created to establish learning needs and priorities for staff. The information gathered will feed into individual support plans tailored to each delivery agent. From these a training calendar has been devised for Phase 1 and the early part of Phase 2 detailing learning events to cover the following themes:

  • What is youth work?
  • Monitoring and measurement
  • Group work approaches
  • Mentoring
  • Border lives
  • Good relations
  • Citizenship and building social activism

Further themes can be added depending on the needs of staff and direction of delivery agents.

To support the development of youth participation mechanisms across delivery agents, YouthPact will run 6 Young Voices events for young people from each project to interact and input into the programme. Practitioner support will also include the creation of online youth work resources by Ulster University and Maynooth University for sharing of information and best practice. This includes a new suite of online training materials through an Erasmus+ partnership 2017-2019. These support, development and enhancement activities will build the capacity and confidence across staff to deepen sustainable outcomes and impacts for young people.

The YouthPact team are gathering information on the monitoring and measurement tools being used by delivery projects. Information gathered will feed into a co-designed monitoring framework for all projects. This will take account of the measurement tools and monitoring practices already in place by project deliverers, while also considering how to maximise the robustness of data captured.

YouthPact will identify good practice in data collection from Phase One, identifying effective practice that can be incorporated into Phase Two. Delivery barriers will also be identified and extra support measures agreed for specific project deliverers.

YouthPact will work with delivery agents to enhance their data collection methods to include measurement scales of distance travelled, with interviews, focus groups, case studies and stories.

The YouthPact Project Manager and UU Development Officer will lead on gathering global evidence-based practice on youth work, peace-building and good relations through literature review and analysis. These interventions will differ from the Programme evaluation as they will inform the development of best practice intervention models rather than impact assessment.

YouthPact will produce the ‘8 steps to inclusive youth work’ and 6 short practice and policy papers. These will capture emerging evidence-based practice from delivery agents and the depth of participant outcomes and change and will emerge from the materials generated through learning events.

Three larger Sharing the Learning events will be run for all delivery agent staff. Each event will have a different focus, with quality and impact in mind. The first will develop and disseminate the co-designed monitoring framework to all delivery agent staff. The second will explore impact and models of practice from Stage One, with a view to adjusting the approaches of delivery agents for maximum impact. The third, towards the programme end, will offer observations on impact, models of practice, distance travelled and policy perspectives.

It is intended that signposting resources and people will be available with information stands from YouthPact partner organisations, delivery agents and relevant external organisations at various events throughout the delivery. Signposting will be towards citizenship, good relations opportunities, further development of personal and social capabilities to support long-term change.

Sharing of resources and disseminating good practice will include establishing an electronic dissemination point; online resources; social media channels for practice and policy dissemination and sign-posting content (for project participants and delivery staff); a project e-zine; profiling events through print media.

In accordance with the phased structure, a 2-phased reporting plan will be adopted:

  • A report on Stage One outcomes/impacts detailing key recommendations on the direction for Stage Two delivery; Project Delivery patterns of concern or interest; illustration of Stage One distance travelled; support and development priorities for Stage Two.
  • A report on Stage Two outcomes/impact to disseminate project methodologies which maximise transformational outcomes for targeted young people.

These monitoring, research and measurement actions will build consistency of approach, outcome and measurement across delivery projects to provide robust evidence-base for project results.

Co-operation Ireland

Lead Partner
Unit 5 Weavers Court Business Park
Linfield Road
Belfast
BT12 5GH

Tel: +44 (0)28 9089 1027 | M +44 (0)77 1749 3801

Pobal

M:TEK II Building
Armagh Road
Monaghan, H18 YH59

Tel: +353-1-5117728 | M +353877010039

Ulster University

Shore Road
Newtownabbey
BT370QB

Tel: +44 (0)28 9036 6858

National Youth Council of Ireland

3 Montague St
Dublin 2
Ireland

Tel: +44 (0)28 9089 1020 | M. +44 (0)7738 313 965