New research sets the foundations for deeper understanding of self-employment for young people from marginalised backgrounds. The team at Youth Futures Foundation and The Social Innovation Partnership explore what we can learn from our newly published report, ‘Choosing your freedom’.
Throughout the second half of 2022, Youth Futures worked alongside The Social Innovation Partnership (TSIP) and Word on the Curb (WOTC) on a piece of ‘discovery’ research, aiming to find out more about why young people from marginalised backgrounds are driven to pursue self-employment.
The research also asked what makes self-employment ‘good quality’ and what support is available to create and maintain good quality self-employment. Young people were placed at the heart of this research as paid co-designers and peer researchers, interviewing other young people and organisations working in this space.
This participatory approach enabled the young people to explore their shared experiences in a way that we could not have done otherwise. We then brought the young people, stakeholder organisations and the project team back together for a roundtable discussion on the findings in February 2023.
