Impact Organisations November Forum bringing partners together

One of the key principles of an effective partnership model is mutuality: having a common purpose and sharing a feeling, action, or relationship with others. There is no better way to facilitate this than to bring partners together, and that is the driver behind the Skills Builder Impact Organisations Forums.

These monthly forums create opportunities for partner organisations to come together virtually for the latest developments, to share best practice, to reflect on their own programmes and network with like-minded people. 

Collective Impact was the theme for the recent forum; coinciding with the release of our Impact Report 2023, we focused on how we measure essential skill development in a consistent way across a partnership of 900 organisations, employers and education settings.

At Skills Builder Partnership, we have set ourselves the ambitious goal of delivering 10 million opportunities to boost essential skills by 2025. We aim to reach those through high quality, structured programmes,approved as delivering against the Skills Builder Universal Framework.  To achieve this, our strategy through to 2025 focuses on five priorities:

• Grow the Partnership by growing the number of education, impact organisation and employer partners.
• Provide high quality platforms and content to drive essential skills development at scale.
• Align infrastructure organisations, those organisations who set the rules and norms for others to help make the Skills Builder approach the standard.
• Influence national policy by engaging with national government to create more high quality opportunities to boost essential skills.
• Build global networks by sharing resources and materials in different languages and being part of the international skills conversation.

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Bringing collective impact to life in the forum

We were pleased to be joined by a guest speaker: Viktória Csákány, Pedagogical Operations Manager at Egyesek Youth Association.  Based in Hungary but working across Europe, Egyesek is a community of active youth and young professionals who aim to explore their own strengths and skills, using them consciously within personal and professional development.  

Viktória reflected on their journey with Skills Builder, where participants involved in the programme are introduced to the eight essential skills through a series of workshops.  The elements of each session and mentoring conversation are then designed to focus on specific and relevant essential skills.  Before and after each training programme, participants assess themselves through Skills Builder Benchmark and are assessed during their practice by two evaluators.

It was great to hear how young people taking part in the programme, who had been supported to reflect on their own essential skill development, are now taking that approach into their own work, as they design programmes and deliver sessions with a focus on essential skills.

The Sheffield-based education and adventure charity Endeavour has used their training and support time on the Impact Programme to audit and create resources, with the Skills Builder team also supporting upskilling their team.  Endeavour are developing a new programme which offers young people educational and adventure-based experiences that focus on building skills, and raising awareness of careers and future opportunities.  The programme, developed by Endeavour and led by volunteer coaches from different businesses, is for students in Year 9-11.  Endeavour were supported by the Skills Builder team to map skill steps to activities and create resources that support reflection and enable participants to capture progression data, as well as providing training for coaches to develop their own understanding of effective essential skills.

Reflecting on the power of collective impact as we were reminded not only of the power of working together to transform essential skills, but that it is far beyond the scope of any single organisation to effect such change.

We know from our research that building essential skills has an impact: people with higher levels of essential skills have higher earnings, higher job satisfaction, higher life satisfaction and higher social mobility.  The Skills Builder approach to capturing the impact of our collective recognises the varying intensity of programmes, whilst recognising that programmes of all Impact Levels have a role to play.  

The forum ended with a celebration of every organisation’s contribution to the progress already achieved towards the wider, collective mission of the partnership and a call to action for attendees to consider the impact of their own programmes and the role these play in the road to 10 million opportunities.

Partner organisations can sign up for future forums using the Forum Schedule in their Members’ Pack.  Interested in joining the Partnership and being part of our growing collective impact?  Find out more about programmes for Impact Organisations and how to become a member here, or contact the team directly.

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We are grateful to our supporting organisations for making this work possible, by funding education programmes, investing to scale up impact organisation programmes, and collaborating on research that builds the case for essential skills, and how to build them effectively.