Executive Summary — Better Together for Youth
The Youth Alliance is the Community of Practice for youth empowerment established in 2022 at the initiative of Impact Europe and Schneider Electric Foundation to foster collaboration and advocacy for empowering youth in Europe.
Economic instability, educational disparities, mental health issues and environmental concerns – collaboration and collective action are essential to addressing these issues effectively, ensuring that young people have the resources, opportunities and support they need to thrive.
The Youth Alliance, hosted by Impact Europe, aims to empower youth by co-funding and coinvesting in projects, sharing knowledge, driving systemic change and integrating youth voices in decision-making. This position paper outlines the Youth Alliance’s efforts to support disadvantaged youth and youth social entrepreneurs. It builds on research to provide best practices, insights and new developments on collaboration, coinvesting, impact management and measurement and advocacy. The paper is intended for a diverse audience of impact capital providers and supporters (from public to private sectors), as well as policymakers committed to youth empowerment. The authors aim to inspire new impact capital providers and supporters interested in collectively addressing youth challenges to join the Youth Alliance, as well as provide an additional perspective for policymakers to drive meaningful policy change for better youth empowerment across Europe. As the paper details the collaborative methods of the Youth Alliance, we hope to highlight areas where these audiences can find ways to add to the collaboration and leverage their resources. Impact capital providers can find, throughout Section 2, opportunities to share knowledge and co-invest, while a framework for policymakers is presented in Section 3. While this paper is written from the perspective of current Youth Alliance members, its insights apply to potential funders, impact capital providers, donors and grantees, as well as actors active in the field of youth work. The recommendations in Table 1 apply to these various actors.
General challenges for young people are discussed in Section 1, but notably the focus zooms in on the challenges of youth social entrepreneurs, as supporting this group is a key leverage point for the Alliance and its co-investment strategy; readers who support social enterprises, even those unrelated to youth, may still find insights in the mapping of these challenges. While some recommendations presented throughout the paper refer specifically to the work of the Youth Alliance (e.g., Section 2), we offer these learnings to a wider audience to show a unique collaborative methodology that adds the voice of youth to the ongoing conversation about their challenges. Throughout Section 2, the Youth Alliance uses a survey to reflect on the efficacy of our methods and discuss avenues for refinement in depth; we show our inner workings with the hope that they will apply beyond the Alliance. Specifically, these learnings may apply to other communities of practice and coalitions that attempt to align investments and support to a group or theme.
The Alliance is testament to the fact that together we can make a difference for young people, with young people.
As a community of practice, we want to collaborate and learn while growing and becoming more successful in supporting disadvantaged youth and social entrepreneurs across Europe.
Four main objectives and solution approaches emerge from this work:
Youth challenges transcend individual or localised circumstances, calling for a more systemic approach to address them. To effectively tackle youth-related issues, it is essential to go beyond addressing symptoms and delve into root causes through building partnerships and cross-sector collaboration, thereby allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of these issues, while enabling tailored and impactful solutions. Youth should be actively engaged in shaping projects and programs to better fit their needs.
The Youth Alliance offers a compelling model of collaboration, sharing knowledge and orchestrating funding solutions that are complementary across the capital chain. By creating a platform for peer learning and knowledge sharing, we try to reduce complexity while aligning along shared interests and goals. Innovative financing approaches like co-funding, co-investing and public-private partnerships are pivotal, as they enable larger, more sustainable projects but also reduce risks for investors and funders, while maximising impact.
Collective efforts should be evaluated collectively. The Youth Alliance emphasises the importance of measuring and managing impact to understand the changes created by its activities and refine them to increase positive outcomes. Embedding impact measurement and management in its operations is vital for learning from current results and understanding what to improve in the future. To achieve systemic change, it is important to align along shared goals and a shared set of indicators for measuring impact across initiatives. Integrating a systems-change lens could enable the Youth Alliance to understand how investments influence systemic and structural barriers. Timely and adaptive data collection is essential for refining collective initiatives, strengthening responsiveness and assessing the effectiveness of collective strategies. An iterative process, forming a collective Theory of Change, could further clarify objectives, actions and KPIs, enabling better evaluation of investments’ expected impact.
Advocate for youth. We want to provide an additional perspective for policymakers by engaging with them to drive meaningful policy change while learning from young people and organisations we support and work with. We need to engage with policymakers to drive meaningful policy changes that align with youth needs, while fostering learning and collaboration between impact capital providers and policymakers to improve joint projects and their impact. Simpler regulation, cross-border impact finance and better leveraging of public and private funding mechanisms are needed for fostering more public-private partnerships to support youth better. Additionally, building coalitions and learning networks to amplify the impact of youth initiatives can ensure policy frameworks tailored to the needs of young people left behind.
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