Ways of working with young people

Our team work collaboratively with you to embed and develop work to support and empower young people’s voices.

We can manage every element of an engagement project, including safeguarding, young people’s expenses, commissioning freelancers and sourcing venues. We can also provide advice, strategic plans, and training that ensures your own team can take any work forward in future.

Its this combination of operational excellence and decades of collective experience in our senior delivery team that ensures a successful project when you commission Upstart Projects.

Stages in your project will always include:

1. Every project starts with a discovery phase – where we truly understand what you’re looking to achieve with the project.
2. We design the programme plan; ensuring we know which skills, expertise and other resources will be needed.
3. We deliver the project utilising these skills and resources.
4. We evaluate the effectiveness of the project, developing any learning we can use for future work; iterations of the same project and identifying best practice that may even inform our training work.

What other phases might your project include? Here’s a few…

Developing an expert team including young people as experts in their lived experiences.

Programme design and evaluation – ensuring the objectives and outputs of any project are planned from the start and that we can build in appropriate impact and evaluation throughout each stage of the project. Usually this includes baseline surveys, mid-project reviews, end of project evaluations and after project impact measurement. This is especially helpful when the commissioner is a collection of organisations.

Project delivery with iterative review and improvements. This will take lots of forms, but impactful and closely monitored delivery is key to success.

Project embedding to ensure internal buy-in and champions help to facilitate the long term growth and sustainability of the project. Whether it’s listening to the results of a consultation project or being receptive to embedding youth voice within your decision making processes.

Exposing findings – by documenting and disseminating the work of young people, the findings of research, and the way we have achieved the results. This might be through internal reports or commissioned films and handbooks or other reports crafted for external stakeholders.