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Inspire 2022

UK Youth
Grantholder

A programme of youth-led social action and community events across the UK inspired by the major events as part of the #iwill Fund.

Project information

£1,700,000

Grant amount

December 2021

Date awarded

December 2021 – November 2023

Project duration

UK-wide

Location

In partnership with:
British Red Cross, Youth Action Northern Ireland, Youth Cymru, Youth Scotland
Download: Inspire 2022 Evaluation

Project Detail

Project summary

Inspire 22 was a youth-led social action and community events project that empowered young people to make a difference in their communities, with over 2000 young people leading events over two years. The project was delivered by UK Youth in collaboration with the British Red Cross, Youth Action Northern Ireland, Youth Cymru and Youth Scotland. Inspire 22 was jointly funded by Spirit of 2012 and the #iwill Fund (a partnership between The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport).

In 2022 and 2023, there was an extraordinary confluence of major events – including the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the 75th anniversaries of the NHS and arrival of Empire Windrush, alongside a tentative appetite for a return to collective celebration following COVID-19. Ten years on from the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, we wanted to mark the Games’ promise to ‘inspire a generation’ with a new project involving young people in some of those national moments not as participants, but as organisers of activity within their own communities.

Event volunteering is highly visible, helping to change negative perceptions that some older people might have of young people’s willingness to help out in their community. Learning from previous social action projects had also taught us that youth organisations do not always have the networks and capacity to engage with other community organisations in their area, and that those organisations in turn often had difficulties engaging a younger demographic. Community development experts Local Trust came on board as partners during the design phase of the Fund to help bridge this gap, and then supported UK Youth throughout delivery with training and access to their Big Local network.

From a community fun day in collaboration with local businesses, to a dance festival for young women, a Jubilee tea party for local care home residents, to an LGBTQ+ Pride Festival, young people took inspiration from a wide variety of local and national sources to design their events. Some wanted to highlight issues of social justice and mental health, others simply to bring different parts of the community together.  Brighton and Hove Youth Council approached the Network of International Women for Brighton and Hove and the Hummingbird Project for young migrants to organise their event, Cooking Across Continents, a celebration bringing migrants and non-migrants together to share food and make new friendships. In Edinburgh, young people from Youth Scotland wanted to add new family activities to an existing local event, the Tweed Love Festival, designing a treasure hunt for younger children and their parents. Several projects inspired by the Queen’s Jubilee focused on green space and conservation.

Impact & Learning

Key learnings:

  • The flexible approach of Inspire 2022 – giving young people the freedom to organise an event ‘inspired by’ any local or national event – had both advantages and disadvantages. It gave significant room for local youth organisations, and the young people themselves to explore social issues of interest to them and build on existing work. These high levels of ownership may be behind the increases in numbers of young people who felt their voices were heard.
  • However, the sheer variety of sources of inspiration meant that at times the project had less connection to the major events of 2022 and 2023 than we had envisaged, and we therefore gathered less information about how such events could and should engage young people as leaders.
  • We have mixed evidence about whether events-based social action offers a good entry point to young people taking up volunteering long term. Whilst the fact that 78% were new to this sort of initiative suggests that events can help draw different groups to volunteering, interviews with youth workers indicated that organising events was challenging and felt reasonably high stakes: young people of course wanted their events to be successful and required significant support to make that happen.
  • There were three broad categories of events:
    • Young people designing events for other young people;
    • Young people sharing issues they cared about with the wider community;
    • Young people putting on events for the wider community.

It would have been interesting to explore whether these different types of events had different outcomes.

  • Encouraging and training young people to consult with their wider community about what they might want from an event was a different way of working for many youth organisers and led to an exciting array of new partnerships forming with charities, business, local government and community safety teams.

321

youth-led events delivered across the UK from Birmingham to Belfast, Milton Keynes to Throckley.

£334,631

in grants directly distributed to young people, with an additional £25,136 allocated via an Access Fund to remove barriers to participation.

2,354

young people engaged in events-based youth-led social action, with 1,800 (78%) of those introduced to this kind of initiative for the first time.

22,000

people

across the UK attended events

83%

The project was successful at increasing the number of young people who would take part in community events: from half of young people at the baseline, to 83% at the end.

88%

participants

participants said they would take part in social action again; some had already launched follow-up projects in their communities by the time of the evaluation.

70%

participants

felt their voices were likely to be heard in local decision-making, up from just a third at the beginning of the project.

Almost all

young people already cared about their area before starting Inspire (94% unchanged at base and endline), but at the end of the project, more young people were prouder of their community: from 65% to 83%. More young people also thought their area was somewhere that people from diverse backgrounds got on well together (52% baseline to 69% at end).

A year of Inspire 2022!

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