BALTIC : YOUTH : IMPACT

Background Social impact is becoming a more important subject for both social enterprises and youth organisations. Often youth organisations lack knowledge and understanding about the actual quality of their work, if what they do really reaches their goals and how, and what exactly they should do to improve their work in order to create the impact they want. Moreover, they also lack the understanding and insight about why they should track, evaluate and communicate their impact, so they just keep their business as usual, "write projects", implement activities for activity sake, without ever asking the question if they are really creating the positive change. In all Baltic states there is very little information available for youth organisations about the importance of social impact management, let alone user-friendly tools or consultation services. National youth policies rarely mention or tackle this topic, leaving it all up to organisations, social enterprises and youth workers themselves to figure out if and how they could track, evaluate and communicate their impact. The problem with poor social impact management among youth organisations creates challenges and tensions also on a larger policy level. Objectives The main objectives of the project were 1. to improve the capacity, skills and know-how of youth workers in youth organisations in Baltic States on topics related to social impact management (impact tracking, measurement, evaluation and communication), and 2. to promote the importance and approaches of social impact management in youth organisations among policy makers and stakeholders in Baltic countries by creating practical, user-friendly impact management tools and policy recommendations and implementing non-formal education learning and experience sharing events for youth organisations. Implementation The main activities were about developing and disseminating the educational materials and tools in English, Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian (altogether 5 publications in different user-friendly formats, including web pages, videos, diagrams in addition to pdf-document); The main activities to support the development as well as initial dissemination of the results were 2 social impact management transnational learning events; After completion of the results, the 6 multiplier events helped to involve different stakeholders to disseminate all the outcomes. Achievements - The youth work and social enterprise sector has received a coherent package to inspire and train them how to increase the impact of their work regarding the well-being and development of young people; - The package has been tested at and improved thanks to two in-depth multinational training courses and other feedback from the stakeholders; the package is diverse content-wise and technically while forming a logical whole; - content-wise, it includes needs analysis and current good practice examples, comprehensive toolbox, communication handbook, policy recommendations); - technically, the materials include logically structured and attractively designed pdf-files, web pages, diagrams and other visual graphic content, videos etc; - all the outputs that form the package have been naturally integrated to the web sites, social media channels and other resources of the partners, thus becoming an integral part of their work while strongly referencing the project as whole and keeping the transnational part highly visible; - the outputs are available in three national languages and English, greatly helping further dissemination to additional stakeholders.