YIF8: Simulating the economic benefits of youth work

This is the eighth in a series of learning and insight papers, published as part of the learning project for the Youth Investment Fund (YIF).

YIF is one of the biggest investments in open access youth provision in recent years. As such, it provides a unique opportunity to gain insights into a field that, in terms of impact, is currently under-researched and poorly understood.

As part of the YIF learning project, we sought to develop a model that estimates the long-term value of open access youth services for participants and society at large. The aim was to find out whether such a model was possible given the methodological challenges. We tested the model with outcomes data from twelve grant-holders who collected baseline and three month surveys from young people and eleven grant-holders who collected baseline and six month surveys. In this paper, we report on our model for simulating the economic benefits of of open access youth provision.

You can click here to read the ‘Executive summary’ of this report.