08 April 2025
Summary:
Our Community Impact team is working on a number of projects to help amplify young resident voices so they can positively impact the future housing decisions affecting them.
Whether training them as peer researchers, sharing their aspirations about their housing situations or telling the story of how the housing crisis is affecting them, we are committed to ensuring that young residents are listened to, understood and that meaningful action is taken in partnership with them.
Training Young Connectors at Clapham Park
This year, we initiated a collaboration with Active Communities Network (ACN) to train young people from Clapham Park in Youth Work. In January, a group of MTVH Young Connectors began a 12-week programme to learn how to engage effectively with their peers, address social issues and promote positive change on the estate.
In May, six of these Young Connectors were employed by ACN to play a key role in driving youth-led initiatives at Clapham Park over the next 12 months. With 4 hours as paid work and 4 hours as volunteer time, they will be covering the following four topics:
– Raising young people’s voices: influence, professionalism and purpose
– Health, well-being and equality
– Connecting young people to community resources
– Inclusive regeneration planning: youth-led input
Flourishing Futures
Flourishing Futures is a peer-led research project empowering young people to address barriers to employment and foster inclusivity across three large estates in Brent: Chalkhill, Stonebridge and Church End.
Funded by the Youth Futures Foundation’s Connected Futures Programme, and as part of a consortium including MTVH, Spark, Brent Council, Hyde and Catalyst Housing, the project joins up different services within the borough so that young people furthest from the job market receive good quality, consistent support that understands their complex needs.
Young people in Brent were paid in their role as consultants and educators to the project, developing employability skills and being empowered to have their views lead to civic action. We worked collaboratively with the consortium to further develop our existing work to increase opportunities and employment for young people in Brent, building on Chalkhill Forever young people’s group and the One Flow One Brent partnership programme.
Phase one of Flourishing Futures saw us working closely with local young people through a Participatory Action Research approach, with the findings forming the basis for the project’s proposed solutions and next steps.
Developing our Housing Futures partnership for young people
Recognising that more needs to be done to engage young people in decisions about housing, and following on from our 2022 report ‘Housing Futures: The vital role of home in young people’s futures’, we developed a partnership with two other housing associations, Clarion and Hyde, as well as the Partnership for Young London, to help build the youth voice, share learning across the housing sector and influence future policy together.
As part of this partnership, a group of young people including six younger MTVH residents were trained as peer researchers. Over the last twelve months, they have led a survey of over 50 young housing association residents and conducted interviews with housing association CEOs and colleagues to better understand how young peoples’ voices can be included in future housing decisions.
Some recommendations from their research include that young people should be defined as a separate stakeholder and that youth voices should be represented at every level of a housing organisation. In April, we held a ‘Housing Reimagined’ event in London to share interim findings from the research and create recommendations for young people in housing policy. The findings were also presented at a number of sector events, such as the Centre for London Summit 2024 and Housing 2024