28/05/2025
By David Kingsley FRSA FRSPH MAIEP MCDI
Across the Employability Sector, we often encounter young people whose journeys into work don’t follow conventional routes. At Change In Youth CIC, I’ve been supporting a cohort of freelance detached outreach workers – many of whom are long-term unemployed, or system-impacted. Despite their lived experience and powerful community insight, traditional employment structures often fail to recognise or reward their strengths.
This article explores how we can take a more trauma-informed, community-rooted approach to youth employability – particularly for those who’ve been freelance, underemployed, or out of sustainable work for over five years.
Meeting Young People Where They Are
Many of the individuals I’ve supported through Change In Youth CIC were previously engaged in youth programmes coordinated by a local community organisation in Hackney. These initiatives were instrumental in developing their confidence, leadership, and facilitation skills – especially for those from underrepresented backgrounds.
However, a recent restructure resulted in the winding down of the youth development programme. As a result, many of the young people previously engaged through this work were left without sustained employment or a transition plan – highlighting a lack of continuity and cross-departmental coordination.
A private conversation with the organisation’s senior leadership revealed an underlying discomfort with supporting participants who were perceived as “rough around the edges” – those without polished CVs, prior professional experience, or the language of formal spaces. There was a clear preference for ‘finished products’ rather than individuals still navigating personal or structural challenges. This outlook is deeply disheartening, as it overlooks the significant talent, potential, and creativity these young people carry – particularly when they’ve had limited access to opportunity.
While Change In Youth CIC stepped in to offer freelance opportunities and maintain momentum, this abrupt shift exposed a gap in strategic planning for youth progression. For those affected, the collapse of formal pathways added to feelings of disposability and loss of identity – an all-too-common experience when youth involvement is tokenistic rather than genuinely embedded.
Long-Term Unemployment: Beyond the Label
Several members of the current cohort have struggled to secure sustainable, salaried employment for an extended period. Others remain in a cycle of precarious freelance or gig-economy work, often classed as ‘underemployed’ despite possessing strong skills in youth outreach, facilitation, and community organising.
Traditional employment services can sometimes overlook these strengths. Instead, focusing on compliance-based models that fail to account for context. When young people are told to “get any job” without recognising their lived experience or passion for youth work, the result is low confidence, low retention, and further disengagement.
Yet these young people hold rich experience from freelance youth-led initiatives, community mentoring roles, and health-based outreach interventions. What they often lack is validation, structure, and coaching to translate these experiences into mainstream employment.
It’s also important to move beyond a pathology-based model that frames young people solely through deficit or dysfunction. Instead, we must adopt a strengths-based, psychosocial lens that recognises how wider societal factors – like poverty, exclusion, and trauma – shape individual behaviours and opportunities.
Social Determinants of Employability
At the core of these challenges are the social determinants of employability: housing insecurity, digital exclusion, mental health, and access to care. For this cohort, supported employment models – which combine job coaching with wraparound support – would be far more effective than standalone CV workshops or one-off appointments.
Our practice integrates Making Every Contact Count (MECC) principles, trauma-informed coaching, and income maximisation strategies to help participants stabilise their lives while planning for work. We also acknowledge disproportionality: the fact that Black and marginalised young people are more likely to experience long-term unemployment, school exclusion, and poor access to career pathways.
From Engagement to Co-Production
A recurring tension in youth employability is the difference between engagement and genuine co-production. Too often, young people are brought into programmes as representatives but are given little say in design, delivery, or strategy. This tokenisation erodes trust and fosters apathy.
At Change In Youth CIC, participants are not only service users – they are shapers of the process. Through detached outreach, they help design workshops, suggest intervention ideas, and co-lead sessions. This co-production approach fosters ownership, encourages accountability, and reinforces the idea that youth workers are professionals with insight, not just recipients of support.
True co-production requires mutual accountability – between practitioners, organisations, and young people. It demands that we share power, build relational trust, and reflect critically on how our own practices either empower or constrain youth agency.
By positioning participants as experts by experience, we not only honour their lived knowledge but also create more responsive, inclusive systems of support. Their insights challenge traditional top-down models and help shape programmes that reflect real-world complexity.
Detached Outreach as a Model for Engagement
Change In Youth CIC’s detached model allows us to support young people in their own spaces and on their own terms. Detached doesn’t mean disengaged – it means flexible, relational, and grounded in trust. Through workshops and one-to-one coaching, we co-create career plans, update CVs, and identify transferable skills often overlooked in standard employment assessments.
This model has also enabled participants to explore cross-sector roles – ranging from patient and public involvement in healthcare, to facilitation roles within youth-led organisations such as Account Hackney. We actively promote horizontal mobility across the health, housing, and creative sectors, supporting participants to build hybrid career pathways that reflect both their personal interests and the needs of their local communities.
Spotlight: A Word from Deji Adeoshun, Co-Founder and Director of Change In Youth CIC:
“Change In Youth is about giving back – not just to communities, but directly to young people – by offering tangible opportunities. Whether that’s through employment via our Detached Outreach programme or improving access to mental health services through our Positive ID programme, it’s about giving young people a voice and enabling them to create positive change in their communities.
“We do this by making sure young people are empowered, that they feel heard, and by upskilling them so they can gain employment and start influencing the spaces that need to be influenced. It’s about young people with lived experience speaking their truth and being recognised as professionals.
“Change In Youth exists to change communities for the better – but also to empower them to govern themselves and be the best they can be.”
Continuity, Collaboration, and Care
The abrupt end of the youth programme served as a reminder that employability support must be continuous, not conditional. Young people should not be left behind due to funding cycles, restructures, or poor cross-departmental communication. When continuity is broken, organisations like Change In Youth CIC become a lifeline—but we should not be operating in isolation.
What’s needed is greater alignment between supported employment services, local authority teams, health partners, and voluntary sector networks, all working together to offer clear and stable progression routes. That includes stronger links with PCNs, community health programmes, and emerging health careers – especially in youth mental health and peer advocacy.
Conclusion
Employability practice must evolve to reflect the realities of those we serve. Detached outreach, trauma-informed coaching, and holistic planning are not add-ons – they are essentials. If we want to reduce youth unemployment and build truly inclusive pathways, we must design support that acknowledges both barriers and brilliance.
By reframing how we define and measure readiness, and embedding co-produced, cross-sector intervention models, we empower young people not just to find work, but to shape the systems they work within.
