vested. What can make the biggest impact on youth unemployment in London? A co-design perspective from Vested

We’ve now held three sessions with the vested. panel — which is bringing together young people with experience of unemployment to shape £300,000 of investment aimed at organisations in London.

We’ve spent time discussing impact, sharing stories, and hearing from social businesses and investors. It’s been a privilege for Shift to be stewards of this process.

Now, the news is in — the panel has a clear focus for the kinds of organisations it wants to support to address youth unemployment. The decision below is taken from a proposal the panel voted on together.

“We think that we can have the biggest impact on youth unemployment in London by investing in organisations that employ young people directly in good work”

This focus on wanting to invest in “good work” came out strongly and organically in panel discussions. It emerged as something everyone found common value in supporting, despite the diversity of backgrounds and experiences within the panel. By good work, the panel mean work that:

• Pays people fairly for their time
• Offers people a career rather than just a job
• Prioritises people’s mental health and wellbeing

Discussions in the panel surfaced a feeling that young people are often excluded or discouraged from the labour market by jobs that didn’t pay enough to live in London, jobs which offered no vision or promise of career progression, and jobs that were inflexible and showed little care for young people’s wellbeing.

Vested Panellists making decisions together

Not all decisions about the panel’s chosen investment focus were so straightforward. To help complete their criteria, the panel requested a discussion with the Trust for London team in their final session, where they shared everything they were considering as important in who they were looking for.

In this session, a question emerged around how we could frame this funding opportunity so that organisations could clearly see it as relevant to them, in order to drive applications. And this meant getting a little clearer on how organisations were providing opportunities for good work.

Did the panel want to support:

1. organisations offering training, education and support, to help young people into into good work in the future

or

2. organisations offering direct employment in good work, with more flexibility over the products or services that organisation provided?

Vested Panellists in the Trust for London offices.

We saw lots of back-and-forth discussion in our final panel session on this point, and the panel saw advantages in each option. Individuals favoured different options, based on their own lived and professional experiences. For some, training, education and employment support offered a chance to impact more people and provide tools that could be used well into the future. For others, they’d experienced ineffective employment support in the past, and wanted to fund work itself rather than a promise of that in the future.

In the end, it came down to a vote. It was tight, but the panel ultimately decided collectively in favour of option 2 — funding organisations employing young people directly.

One panellist shared an analogy in the session that well-captured a primary motivation we saw for this decision: “it’s no use training people how to find water in a desert, where there’s no water around to be found.”

Sorting through investment criteria

So, we have our focus.

I think it’s fair to say that we at Shift and Trust for London didn’t anticipate this decision at the start of the process, having imagined something more in line with option 1 around employment support or training.

But this is the real value of co-designed approaches — the decision feels genuinely different, and true to the experiences of those who’ve been most impacted by this issue.

Tomorrow, we’ll share a personal perspective on this decision process from a panellist, before sharing collective themes emerging from the panel’s reflections after Christmas, where we’ll unpack what else shaped this decision and helped the panel to come to it in a confident way.

In the meantime, this funding is now live for application! You can find full criteria and register interest on the vested. website.

Please share this opportunity with organisations you think might be a good fit for vested. funding, and benefit from financial support.