Positive Youth Foundation
Nifty recently supported the Positive Youth Foundation (PYF) with a participatory review and evaluation of their five-year National Lottery funded Healthy Futures programme. The aim of the Healthy Futures programme is to help young people from some of the most deprived areas of Coventry, where social and wider inequalities are leading to poor health outcomes, to develop skills and capacities they need to make healthy, positive life choices.
Our role was twofold: firstly, we designed a participatory review for PYF to make sure the young people’s voices were heard and reflected in the final report. Secondly, we looked across five years of programme data to build a really clear understanding of the impacts of the PYF approach for the young people, and also its wider value for the city of Coventry is a Marmot City with strategic aims to improve public health.
We carried out one-to-one interviews and a fun, engaging focus groups with a group of Healthy Futures participants in a place they felt comfortable. They were able to freely talk about the significant impacts the programme had had on their lives: raising aspirations, overcoming some of the negative impacts of inequality they had experienced, building skills, knowledge and capacity to help them make positive decisions, and, ultimately, becoming confident, mature young adults with bright futures. One of the notes of feedback we received from the project lead at PYF was that the young people we involved in the research had not had that experience before, and that not only had our approach helped to highlight the impacts of the project, it had helped the young people to reflect on their learning and experience and recognise their own ‘distance travelled’.
Our role was twofold: firstly, we designed a participatory review for PYF to make sure the young people’s voices were heard and reflected in the final report. Secondly, we looked across five years of programme data to build a really clear understanding of the impacts of the PYF approach for the young people, and also its wider value for the city of Coventry is a Marmot City with strategic aims to improve public health.
We carried out one-to-one interviews and a fun, engaging focus groups with a group of Healthy Futures participants in a place they felt comfortable. They were able to freely talk about the significant impacts the programme had had on their lives: raising aspirations, overcoming some of the negative impacts of inequality they had experienced, building skills, knowledge and capacity to help them make positive decisions, and, ultimately, becoming confident, mature young adults with bright futures. One of the notes of feedback we received from the project lead at PYF was that the young people we involved in the research had not had that experience before, and that not only had our approach helped to highlight the impacts of the project, it had helped the young people to reflect on their learning and experience and recognise their own ‘distance travelled’.