YMCA North Tyneside
Winner – Improving Impact – charities with 26+ paid staff
Who they are
YMCA North Tyneside, established in 1879, is best known for its support of disadvantaged young people, in particular young people who have experienced homelessness. It works with young people in a number of support areas, including information, advice and guidance, training and education, arts and music, sports and leisure and outdoors education. It provides life-changing interventions to help people progress and has achieved significant success in helping homeless young people to overcome barriers to achieve sustainable accommodation and employment. Each year YMCA North Tyneside works with at least 600 disadvantaged young people through its community programmes.
What they’ve achieved
YMCA North Tyneside has developed a sophisticated strengths-based impact framework that is enabling staff to target and tailor interventions for service users. Young people are holistically monitored over time using a simple assessment tool, supported by a CRM offering real-time insights and enabling learning and improvement. As a result, the charity is better able to assess a young person’s readiness to move into stable accommodation and young people are involved and able to self-assess their own development. Staff have been able to increase caseloads, and the supported transitions from homelessness into stable accommodation are more successful.
Why they won
The judges were impressed by the charity’s ambition, clarity of vision, and willingness to learn from improved data. Recognising that the charity’s processes for evaluating and measuring impact were not working, trustees showed strong leadership in helping the charity change tactics. Trustees helped shape and implement the new CRM and assessment processes, from defining the mission and codifying the objectives, to lending their expertise to staff. Since implementing the CRM and other new processes, the board has shown a healthy appetite for increased risk supported by increased knowledge, recognising weaknesses before they become failures and pursuing more ambitious strategies for growth. That strategy includes working collaboratively with other YMCAs as well as other related organisations in the region, leading by example and also by directly sharing and exporting their methods of success to help other charities survive and thrive.
