This post shares our emerging thinking about some of the big themes we found through our research, and how they point towards areas for change. Our overall aim for the project is to understand how and why young people are using online services and support to help them with their essential needs, like health, housing and money, and to identify where there are opportunities for strategic change to make support more accessible and youth-led. Seven areas stood out to us from the interviews and workshop as opportunities.

We share our emerging observations from our research looking into essential digital support for young people. Our overall aim for the project is to understand how and why young people are using online services and support to help them with their essential needs, like health, housing and money, and to identify where there are opportunities for strategic change to make support more accessible and youth-led.

Promising Trouble is looking for a freelance community building specialist to facilitate the creation of a Community Tech community of practice.

Promising Trouble is looking for a freelance strategic comms and influencing specialist to support the development of the Community Tech programme of work.

We’re taking an approach called an ‘embedded’ evaluation: this basically means that rather than commission an external evaluation expert to come and observe and talk to us from time to time, we are collectively responsible for evaluating ourselves. Of course, this comes with risks (what if we just say that we’re great or terrible at everything? How can we be objective?) and doesn’t necessarily come naturally, but we decided that the benefits of being able to continuously learn and then adjust what we do or how we do it were worth it.

We’re interested in understanding what online support young people need, how services are responding, and what some of the key challenges are to designing and delivering essential support online.

Community tech - technology that gives power and generates benefit for communities – is a vital part of the modern technology ecosystem.

Promising Trouble and Power to Change hosted two workshops in May, kicking off our programme looking at Community Tech and shaping a major new funding programme.

Promising Trouble is seeking funding to support charities working with refugees, asylum seekers and migrants to develop digital policy and campaigning skills.