Partnering with London Youth, a charity on a mission to champion and strengthen London’s youth organisations, we have built a dashboard to try and show what youth work provision across London looks like. 

We met London Youth when we were both recipients of the Cornerstone Fund round one grants, and staff engaged in the data training we were offering, including PowerBI. 

Upksilling internally as a team, they spotted the potential and we supported them create their own London Youth VCS data tool using their member data. So when they started to explore the picture of youth work provision in the capital, we were a natural project partner and worked together to set up the dashboard mapping tool.

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The process

Our intitial step was to bring together data from the Charity Commission and Companies House. We then filtered that data to identify organisations working in London, who classified the people they help as Young People and referenced Education as a type of service. This gave us about 10,000 charities and community interest companies. We then set about excluding organisations who didn't deliver 'youth work' aligning to our definition:

Voluntary and community organisastions supporting young people’s development (personal, social and/or educational) outside of formal education settings. 

Eligible activities included:

• Youth mentoring
  

• Youth Leadership
  

• Peer-to-peer mentoring
  

• Counselling
  

• Youth clubs

It was a huge team effort working on the data! With the London Youth team, we set about excluding some organisations automatically using keyword searches for terms agreed on - for example 'Parent Teacher Association' or 'Primary School'.

Next was an extensive manual exercise and luckily we had extra help from a number of young people volunteering for London Youth. Joining the project team exposed them to a complex data project and gave them opportunities to learn new skills - using Knack (the low code no code database we pulled the data into initially) and PowerBI to create the dashboard itself.

At London Youth, I’ve enjoyed being at the intersection of research, data, and youth advocacy. It was great to develop my data skills and be allowed free reign to design the dashboard interface. My improved Power BI skillls are proving useful in my new job.

Read Emilie's blog explaining the process in more detail.

We collaborated with a range of organisations bringing local or sector specific knowledge together. They were invited to share their own relevant data and the map now shows additional organisations submitted by organisations including the National Youth Agency, borough Young Foundations, the Jack Petchey Foundation and London Youth's own membership data.

The bulk of this work was carried out in 2024 and early 2025 with some additional data uploaded and further developments made before launching more widely in October 2025.  The timeline follows early iterations of our comprehensive London VCSE Dashboard launched in July 2025.