Stories of Change

Using Most Significant Change to understand outcomes for young people leaving care

The Big House

At the end of 2021, the Centre for Youth Impact ran a series of workshops on ‘Most Significant Change’ for organisations on Esmée’s Young People Leaving Care Learning Programme. This paper shares our approach as well as stories of change from Learning Programme participants.

View the PDF in full screen or click the download button in the top left-hand corner of the window.

Esmée's Leaving Care Learning Programme runs alongside our Young People Leaving Care funding, which supports voluntary sectory organisations who are working to support care leavers. We commissioned the Learning Programme to facilitate learning, collaboration and alliances between the funded organisations, and with Esmée. We shared our insights from our Leaving Care Learning Programme at the end of 2021.

To complement more typical evaluation methods, we wanted to understand the impact made by Learning Programme participants using a story-based evaluation. We also wanted to test Most Significant Change to do this, and explore whether it is a useful approach for describing and communicating the impact of the Learning Programme. We thought it would be especially helpful for capturing the impact of the more creative aspects of the participants’ work.

By sharing the approach alongside the participants’ stories of change, we hope those interested in different ways of evaluation, including other funders, find it useful as well as shining a light on the amazing stories of our funded organisations.

Thanks so much to all the organisations who took part, our Learning Partners, and of course to Centre for Youth Impact for working with us on this.

Let us know what you think

We'd love to know what you think of this approach, and whether you've done something similar, which you found useful. Do also get in touchwith any other feedback about our work.

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