What difference do we make?

For more than 60 years, the Award has been helping young people transform their lives and their communities. We empower young people to develop ‘soft’ – or universal – skills such as resilience, adaptability, creativity, problem solving, decision-making and communication. Developing these skills supports the achievement of long-term positive life outcomes, including educational attainment, employment and mental health and wellbeing. In other words, we help young people to achieve personal change in their lives, which itself can lead to positional change in their environments.

The Award framework can be a blueprint for investing in human capital; specifically strengthening resilience, improving employability and entrepreneurship, promoting prosperity and helping the most vulnerable. It has direct positive financial and non-financial impacts on the people and communities it touches, and through the Awards gained in 2020 alone, it had an impact of £400m globally.

More than a million young people

180,000+ adult volunteers

1,800+ new participants daily

Measuring social impact enables an organisation to understand how its activities have led to positive and negative effects for its stakeholders. By measuring impact, the organisation can then truly start to manage it. The Foundation undertakes various research projects working with expert external consultants to explore the Award’s outcomes and impacts.

Our three key research initiatives are as follows:
  1. Satisfaction surveys to understand the Award experience of young people and adult mentors
  2. Outcomes evaluation to monitor Award participants’ development of soft skills and competences for young people. For our outcomes evaluation, we work in collaboration with the Evidence Development and Incubation Team (EDIT) at Kings College London.
  3. Social value analysis to quantify the impact of the Award on young people, adult mentors and society. For our social value research, we work in collaboration with The Sustainability and Climate Change team at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), UK. You can find more information about our social value research here.

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Today’s young people are bombarded by information, expectations and uncertainty. They are growing up with a mosaic of complexities and challenges unseen by previous generations.

Check out our World Ready Discussion Paper to find out what young people say about the challenges they face today and the types of experiences, learning and skills they think they will need to take on the world of today and tomorrow.

It has never been more important to equip young people with the skills and confidence to discover their true potential. On an individual level this can make a transformational difference to a young person’s life; on a collective basis, it has the power to bring significant change to wider society.