UK Youth’s EmpowHER programme, match funded with the #iwill Fund, provides young women and girls with opportunities to make change in their communities.
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Established in 2018 to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage, EmpowHER supported young women and girls to lead change in their communities, increase their self-esteem and build wellbeing by providing inclusive and meaningful social action opportunities.
Spirit of 2012 and the #iwill Fund each invested £1.3 million in the first phase of the programme, which was delivered by UK Youth, British Red Cross and the Young Women’s Trust. The #iwill Fund was made possible thanks to a £66 million joint investment from The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support young people to access high quality social action opportunities.
UK Youth’s network of youth organisations delivered face-to-face activity sessions with young women and girls. These sessions initially focused on ‘social learning’ topics such as feminism, human rights, empowerment, and resilience. This was followed by a period of social action where girls applied what they had learned to their own projects. Through these sessions, the programme addressed the worryingly low levels of wellbeing amongst young women and girls in the UK and supported them to use their voice, be heard and give back to their local communities.
The British Red Cross were a principal partner on the grant, with a staff member in each of the four regions coordinating local social action opportunities for girls interested in some of their core areas of work such as homelessness, food poverty and support for refugees. British Red Cross were already committed to supporting youth social action (see previous grant Inspired Action for an example), but were interested in trialling through EmpowHER how they could introduce younger girls aged 10 – 15 to their work. Girls were inspired to get involved in a wide range of activities from raising awareness about period poverty, raising funds for local food banks and producing care packs for people experiencing homelessness.
In one project, girls from across the UK designed a patchwork quilt, inspired by the quilt made by women internees held in Changi prison during the Second World War, representing what they felt it meant to be a woman or girl in 2021. Individual patches were sewn together to create a large quilt with 66 patches. The quilt is covered in inspiring messages of hope, strength, and encouragement and is held in the British Red Cross archives.
In February 2020, ten young women (who didn’t know each other) headed to British Red Cross’s world headquarters in Geneva to learn more about fighting for human rights on the global stage. As part of the trip, they spoke to Swiss suffragettes who had fought for the right to vote in the 1960s and 70s! Check out the video of their trip below.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the third and fourth cohorts in the original programme, some delivery shifted online: the retention rate in the third cohort, who began in-person, was lower than that of those before and after it, although still at 77%. Young volunteers helped at a vaccination centre, with the coordinator commenting: “[They] have been a delight. They have been dedicated, always there, always on time. They just get on with it…. they use their initiative, they know they can do stuff and they know they can lead.”
UK Youth produced a comprehensive toolkit for youth organisations looking to deliver EmpowHER, with session plans, activity packs, bitesize social action ideas and evaluation resources.
Spirit awarded a further grant of £500,000 to UK Youth in 2021 for the EmpowHER Legacy programme, to enable them to build on the work done with the original grant by testing different approaches to rolling the EmpowHER toolkit. They wanted to explore what level of centralised support youth clubs needed to embed EmpowHER, so the trial included different levels of funding and training alongside the digital resources. You can find out more about this part of the project here.
Volunteering is an effective mechanism for improving young women’s wellbeing. This programme deliberately reached out to girls with low wellbeing. Many young people are struggling with low self-esteem and feeling pessimistic about the future. As described above, subjective wellbeing improved significantly across the programme – and the effect was more pronounced for girls with the lower starting points. Volunteering is neither a panacea for youth mental health issues, nor a substitute for medical and therapeutic support. However, our evidence suggests that well-structured, supportive social action programmes can play a powerful role in improving wellbeing. Researchers heard from one young women who said that her social action had “saved her life” by giving a sense of “purpose and responsibility, which was taken away when I was struggling and not coping”. Whilst this experience may be exceptional, the data strongly supports the fact that through volunteering young people developed a sense of agency, purpose and optimism about the future that improves overall wellbeing.
Develop an evaluation strategy that enables grant holders to apply lessons during the project, not just at its end: EmpowHER was broken down into four cohorts of activity, with funding provided for learning and reflection points of two months in between each cohort. This allowed the in-house evaluation team to share evidence with youth workers throughout the programme, rather than provide them with a summary at the end. This worked particularly successfully with EmpowHER, where the whole evaluation was done by an internal team. Even where organisations would prefer an external evaluation, there are clear benefits to funding internal staff capacity to review what the evaluation is telling them throughout the project and make changes to delivery as a result.
To maximise the gains from youth social action, funders and policymakers should look to incentivise partnership working. Young people and youth organisations worked in partnership with national organisations (British Red Cross and Young Women’s Trust), their schools, and many local organisations to create their projects, leading to unexpected collaborations which continued beyond the scope of the original programme. In the Leaders of the Future research, UK Youth found that 75% of youth organisations who took part in youth social action said they had strengthened existing community links, 75% said they had created new ones. Community organisations often lack the time and resource to collaborate, and beginning new partnerships can be risky if funders expect things to go right all the time. One of the secrets to EmpowHER’s success was the attention UK Youth and British Red Cross paid to building and maintaining relationship between local and national partners, at a local level, and between young people and those who were supporting them.
Plan for measuring community benefit from the start. Among the main reasons for funding social action to improve wellbeing above other activities is the ‘double benefit’ – the good it brings to the community, as well as to the volunteers. However, getting data on those specific benefits is difficult programmes where each group is working to a different goal. For example, how do you compare a campaign to change PE-kit to increase girls’ confidence, with volunteering at a COVID-19 vaccine centre, or a befriending scheme at a residential care home? At the outset, Spirit of 2012 agreed with UK Youth that it would be the responsibility of girls running each project to think about what success would look like and reflect on whether they had made a difference. However, as we did not want to give up the goal of understanding broader community benefits at the programme level, we decided to explore the effect of social action on cohesion. UK Youth measured whether girls were more likely to meet with people who are different to them and more likely to trust others, and in parallel, looked at how social action changed adults’ perceptions of young people in their community. Understanding community benefit is important and needs a proportionate but ambitious approach planned in from the start.
EmpowHER Legacy showed that a lower-cost model using the EmpowHER toolkit could still support girls into high quality social action in a way that youth organisations found rewarding. However, it did not provide us with the robust evidence base to understand what impact a reduced cost-per-head had on the wellbeing outcomes evidenced in EmpowHER. The decision not to collate ONS4 subjective wellbeing measures was made because the level of funding to each partner organisation was (by design) significantly less in the legacy programme than in the first phase of EmpowHER. The decision for proportionate evaluation understandable but also a missed opportunity. There is a strong case for further cost-effectiveness research exploring what level of central support is needed to achieve the wellbeing outcomes we saw in this programme.
