Listening Fund Resources
Collective Discovery was the Listening Fund’s learning partner from 2021 - 2024. We facilitated, documented and shared learning both within the Fund and outside of it, with youth practitioners, funders, and young people.
The Listening Fund was an England-wide partnership that ran from 2018 - 2024, exploring how the youth sector in England could be more accountable to young people. It provided funding to 38 youth organisations to improve the way they listen to young people, and surface learning along the way.
You can find the key learning resources below, which we hope will be useful for anyone looking to deepen their accountability to young people.
The big picture: key resources on youth listening
If you’re looking for an overview of youth listening, here are the key resources to take a look at:
• Why share power with young people? (Podcast)
• Sharing power with young people. How organisations are sharing power and decisions with young people. (Practice Paper)
• The Listening Fund’s experience of working with Young Advisors. (Learning Journey)
• A guide to exercises which will help your organisation explore how to share power with young people. (Facilitation Guide)
• Listening to youth voice or sharing power with young people (blog for Children and Young People Now)
• Our partners’ top lessons in listening to young people (Blog)
• A young person’s account of the difference good listening can make (Blog)
Podcast
During our time as learning partner for the Listening Fund, we launched a podcast called Shift. For its first season, we recorded 11 episodes, full of insightful conversations with many individuals from the Fund’s grantees. You can find out more about the podcast, including show notes and additional resources, on this page.
Episode 1: Why share power with young people?
Episode 2: Involving young people in designing services and programmes.
Episode 3: Ways to involve young people in learning and evaluation
Episode 4: Creating roles for young people
Episode 5: Creating structures for young people
Episode 6: Ways to involve young people in your governance structure
Episode 7: Hear about grantmaking from a range of perspectives
Episode 8: Exploring the impacts listening to young people can have
Episode 9: The challenges of young leaders and how to help them
Episode 10: Representation, accountability, equity and inclusion
Episode 11: Why young people take leadership roles, and how to support them
Practice papers
Here are some longer reads that explore what we learned from the many grantees we worked with at the Listening Fund over several years, as well as some learning from organisations and reports outside of the Fund.
Sharing power with young people
This is a one-stop shop, setting out how organisations in the youth sector are currently sharing power and decision-making with young people.
This paper sets out why, when and how organisations are involving young people in evaluative work.
Navigating paying young people
This paper explores why, when and how organisations are paying the young people they work with.
Learning journeys
These are accounts of what several Listening Fund organisations grantees tried and tested; what worked, what didn’t, and what they discovered that other youth practitioners and organisations can learn from. See if any of the organisations or headline learnings chime with your context.
The journey of a Cornwall-based charity working with young people in care, including how they created a shadow board.
Journey of a Kent-based organisation supporting refugees and asylum seeking young people - including how they developed a young ambassadors programme.
The journey of a national charity that provides advice and support for young people across digital platforms - including how they involved young people in the development of their organisational strategy.
The journey of a national organisation which supports local Foyers with training, education and accreditation, including how they involved young people in their governance.
The journey of a London-based organisation supporting young care-affected girls, including how they helped young people transition to paid roles, and how they created a youth advisory board.
The journey of a London-based organisation that provides coaching to young men in prisons, including how they set up youth steering committees.
Practical Guides
These guides are designed to be accessible and usable by anyone exploring their organisation’s listening practice. They provide simple reflections, prompts, and exercises you can work through as an individual practitioner, or as a team.
Exercises to help you explore how to share power with young people (Facilitation guide)
Involving young people in recruitment (Quick guide)
Creating effective youth leadership or ambassador roles (Quick guide)
Helping young people into leadership roles (Quick guide)
Blogs
Finally, you can find many blogs from Listening Fund partners at the bottom of this page. However, if you don’t have time to read them all, here some of our favourites: