Collaborative experiment for youth wellbeing

“In order to have an impact on the community, we need firstly to act to do it, and then we need to somehow measure it, monitor it and take out some learnings from it.”

Key stakeholders – city representatives, academia, private organisations and NGOs – have teamed-up in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) to co-design a social innovation fund called FIXCluj dedicated to youth entrepreneurship. This collaborative experiment is supported by Fondation Botnar – a Swiss-based philanthropic foundation working to improve the health and wellbeing of young people living in cities around the world. 

People involved are challenged to prioritise wellbeing over economic growth, care over efficiency, trust over expediency.  

Will this experiment fail, grow, multiply? 

What is important for youth and stakeholders involved?

How can this co-design process be documented, replicated and learned from?

Rural Senses was invited to capture the development of FIX and support the process with data-driven learning. We have integrated the Evidence to Action (E2A) Framework, a tool through which Fondation Botnar and their program partners can frame and operationalise a formal learning agenda.

In our role as Impact Evaluation & Learning facilitators, we talked with people involved in the process (stakeholders, applicants, participants) at various stages of its development. We transform their insights into data that brings evidence to the collaborative process and the development of the initiative. 

Through the Impact Evaluation & Learning Framework for FIXCluj, our objectives are to:

• Encourage a learning culture by asking feedback and sharing insights
• Give space for reflection over the process
• Capture change following the learning indicators
• Support the process with human-centric evidence