The Coventry Youth Partnership (CYP) is a collective of community and statutory organisations who work together to achieve the best possible outcomes for young people in the city.
The partnership, led by Levelling the Playing Field’s specialist partners Positive Youth Foundation, has been in existence for six years. Such has been the success of the model, they now advise and guide organisations who want to set up similar structures in other areas.
CYP has 30-40 members which include local youth organisations, police, the Police and Crime Commissioner, the Youth Offending Service, Coventry City Council and a youth advisory group to ensure young people’s views are represented.
For youth organisations, the benefits of being in the partnership are numerous. As well as the chance to network, share learning, develop their workforce and refer young people between each other to meet their needs, partners can access much wider sources of funding.
For example, Sport England funded Coventry’s local authority for a project called Go Parks, which creates new and exciting ways to use parks and green spaces for sport, physical activity, wellbeing and culture. Instead of Sport England going to individual organisations, the local authority was able to use CYP to commission 10 partners to deliver the project, some of whom may have otherwise missed out on the opportunity.
“It makes perfect systems sense,” says Rashid Bhayat, CEO of the Positive Youth Foundation and founder of CYP in 2016. “Funders like Sport England don’t have time to deal with lots of individual organisations, so to give them a collective response which is mature enough to understand its differences, but at the same time knows what it wants to achieve, has got to be the way to operate.”
Coventry City Council are a key partner within CYP because when they begin an initiative across any of their departments (education, public health, housing, crime etc) related to young people, they don’t need to have conversations with many different stakeholders; CYP is a single point of contact that can disseminate the information equally and at once. The process is streamlined and strategic.
"ONE MOVEMENT"
Rashid says: “CYP means that, for the first time, the youth sector can feel they are one movement working towards similar aims and objectives, rather than people just doing their own thing.”
Rashid admits that building up trust within the partnership, especially among organisations who were used to competing with each other, was initially a challenge.
“Trust is the golden thread running through the partnership and it has taken time to build that,” admits Rashid. “In the very early days, some partners were reluctant to share sensitive information. That competitive atmosphere has now gone – I hope – as partners have recognised this as an opportunity to use each other’s skillsets and specialist services to meet the needs of young people.
“We deliberately stressed very early on that it wasn’t about funding. We all need to keep our lights on and pay the bills and we didn’t want to impact on that for anybody. I’m glad to say we’ve now reached a position where some partners who initially struggled to initiate conversations with funders or agendas now have a route to accessing them due to us working as a collective. Although each organisation still does its own thing, they now recognise there are times when collaborating and using each other’s skillsets is hugely valuable.”
CYP has many similarities with the local multi-agency partnership in Newport, Gwent which was inspired by Levelling the Playing Field. These kinds of collaborations across our delivery areas are helping to make great strides towards achieving the project’s common goals.
Levelling the Playing Field’s Project Lead, Rudro Sen, said: “Partnerships like CYP increase ethnically diverse children’s access to appropriate positive support, particularly within sport and physical activity settings, whilst preventing them from entering the Criminal Justice System. Young people’s life chances are greatly enhanced by having a safe place to develop trust and a sense of belonging.”
CYP is funded by Positive Youth Foundation, chaired independently and its meetings are quarterly, with more regular meetings for a core group of around 10 of its most active members.
Although the partnership has achieved a lot of success, Rashid admits it “doesn’t have all the answers”. He adds: “We had a grand idea to combine all our partners’ data so we could tell one story about the youth work sector’s impact in Coventry. We soon realised that all our individual monitoring and evaluation systems are so varied in nature that we’re some way off being able to achieve that goal yet.”
YOUTH PARTNERSHIPS "A GROWING AGENDA"
It’s Rashid’s view that government policy, particularly within DCMS, is moving towards this agenda of local youth partnerships. CYP is now proactively advising other areas on establishing similar partnerships, although Rashid says there isn’t necessarily a ‘one size fits all’ model.
“Coventry took the decision as a sector we didn’t want to over-formalise this partnership,” he explains. “We know other areas have set up a governed partnership with trustees and a bank account. The challenge with that is all partners are flat out managing their own organisations so we didn’t want to give them another one to keep on top of as well.
“Although it’s not right for us, it might be for others. My advice would be to explore in detail what works for your locality and take time doing that. Make sure key local partners – including young people – are absolutely involved in the process to ensure it achieves what it needs to.
“I’m not saying we’ve got all the answers but others can learn from what has not gone right in Coventry. There’s a whole load of learning here we’d like to share with the sector.
“We would strongly advocate for the development of local partnership models because the outcomes have been phenomenal for the organisations and the young people who have benefited from it.”
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