‘How can the youth and play voluntary and community sector in Lambeth become better integrated’

Collaborative Unit: ‘How can the youth and play voluntary and community sector in Lambeth become better integrated’

In the Collaborative Unit, student teams were collaborating with Young Lambeth Co-op as well as several stakeholders from the 5 specific Lambeth areas. The challenge of this collaboration was to understand and demonstrate the barriers around ethos, communication and data sharing amongst the voluntary and community sector with the aim to identify the needs and importantly the existing assets of the young people. Students ran numerous engaging activities with the young people and the service providers in the community discovering insights and building relationships. After 6 weeks of fieldwork students presented their insights to YLC and received praise as well as constructive feedback and more opportunities to shadow and participate at the police, school and community networking event, commissioner training workshops and Lambeth equality commission events.

Building on those discoveries students developed a range of personas and facilitated co-design workshops with the young people, youth workers and other service providers to develop design concepts.

The Brixton team developed a ‘people help themselves’ community sharing platform allowing service providers to crowdsource resources and involving local community. Team Norwood focussed on the potential of the existing YLC membership to offer a place for personal profile building, career and job opportunities and off line, local touchpoints linked to the membership. Team North Lambeth explored the concept to use the membership to engage the local youth and give them a platform to express their opinion but also to reflect on their personal feelings, using avatars and pet icons to feel at ease. Team Streatham developed the on/offline communication channel for Youth workers and Team Clapham proposes the Young Lambeth gallery as tool for service providers to demonstrate value with parents, the community and potential and attract funding. The outcomes were well received by YLC and expressed a strong interest to implement some of the ideas.