Local Youth Partnerships (LYP) address the needs of children and young adults locally, through partnerships and collaboration. Robust, inclusive and varied partnerships encourage higher investment and support for youth, resulting in better outcomes for children, young people and communities.
LYPs are cross-sectoral partnerships that are established and led at the local level with the goal of convening, supporting, and sustaining youth work delivery in a specific area. LYPs can be initiated by various local organisations, including charities, voluntary organisations, local authorities, and housing associations, among others. They may take various forms, ranging from informal collaborations to formal partnerships or legally constituted organisations. Ultimately they improve outcomes for children and young people by expanding and shaping local provision, securing new resources, providing training and capacity, and creating spaces for leaders, youth workers, and groups and organisations to come together.
The development, sustainability and growth of Local Youth Partnerships is a high priority for Youth Focus North East and we are involved in developing and establishing these models of localised collaborative working in 6 of the 12 Local Authority Areas within the North East:
County Durham
Gateshead
Sunderland
Stockton on Tees
Middlesbrough
Darlington
Gateshead – Youth Work and Strategic Partnership Group
The priority has been to develop the following main themes within in the “Gateshead Youth Offer”:
Health and Wellbeing
Education and Learning
Young People’s Rights and Democracy
Underpinning the development and delivery of the above is the establishment of the Gateshead – Youth Work Strategic Partnership Group (YWSPG).
The YWSPG is a collaborative and organised group that focuses on developing and implementing strategies, initiatives, and policies related to youth work and partnerships within Gateshead. The primary purpose is to create a coordinated collaborative approach to addressing the needs, concerns, and opportunities affecting young people.
There have been some incredible opportunities for the group during the last year, where it has shown the need for further collaborative working. The group challenged a local authority tendering opportunity, as it presented the group with a number of concerns including: timeframes, starting from a position of deficit, how worker’s locations could be changed without notice and how the budget didn’t cover organisational overheads.
Following a letter sent to the leader of the Council it resulted in the tender being suspended until further conversations with this group had taken place. Importantly young people were then part of the redesigning of the tender.
Middlesbrough Youth Mutual
The Middlesbrough Youth Mutual (MYM) was formed by Youth Focus North East working in collaboration with three other youth organisations rooted in the area: Actes, the Linx Youth Project, and the Junction Foundation. In addition to these ‘Lead Members’ a number of other organisations have been or continue to be involved, including Middlesbrough Council, Teesside University, Cleveland Police plus a range of local and regional VCS organisations. MYM describes its mission as being to:
Support the sustainability of high-quality youth provision across Middlesbrough.
MYM has become a space for providers of support to young people to explore how they can work together to better communicate impact, share resources and knowledge, increase the support on offer and work together more effectively. Working together the group has developed a detailed strategy with a common motivation to create a strong and sustainable youth sector in the borough. The strategy sets out a number key priorities reflecting the insights provided by young people themselves, and also the organisations that work with them.
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