Our impact
2022-23 – the year in numbers
96%
of young people said they feel they achieve something when at The Avenues.
927
young people (aged 8-18) participated, up 50% on 2021.
87%
of Summer Programme participants said coming to The Avenues helped keep them fit and healthy.
90%
of young people said The Avenues gave them access to great opportunities.
100%
of our ten (15-18 yr) students course completed our 39-week Level 1 Youth Work training programme in 2022.
Monitoring and evaluation
The Avenues is committed to providing consistent, effective and robust measurement of the impact of our work to ensure we deliver projects that achieve our outcomes for young people, and provide high quality reporting to our funders. We aim to do this with a light touch so not to detract from young people’s enjoyment of visiting The Avenues.
At every session we register attendance to build a pattern of usage. Youth workers make observations and record individuals’ progress in reports at the end of each session. This information is uploaded to our online monitoring system and is used to report course progress and completion, and to build case studies.
We have also adopted a range of feedback tools for young people, including questionnaires, group discussions, surveys, votes, youth meetings and testimonials from young people and parents.
Since 2019 we have employed an in-house Impact and Evaluation Manager, who has been working with an external consultancy to engrain and improve our methods and processes.
We continue to invest in this area and have adopted the digital capture of data via tablets and smartphone questionnaires to improve our efficiency.
Our Theory of Change
In early 2020 we produced The Avenues’s Theory of Change, an evaluation framework that outlines our key objectives for young people, and the indicators we can use to track progress against these desired outcomes.
We devised this by looking at what is happening in our area in terms of living conditions and social pressures, what young people need in terms of skills and opportunities, and what young people want and enjoy doing out of school. We then looked at our capabilities and what we want to achieve as an organisation.
The following simplified chart explains The Avenues’ Theory of Change:
The overwhelming majority of our projects will be designed to meet some or all of these intended outcomes. But it is one thing to know we are having an impact on young people’s lives and another thing to prove it.