Time for Young People: Co-designing an early intervention service with young people

Project Type: Service Design, Youth Participation & Co-design, Organisational Strategy and Systems Change

Organisation: The Children’s Society in collaboration with Newham Council and community partners

My Role: Senior Service Designer: leading co-design with young people and partners, supporting strategy and delivery alignment

Timeline: April 2022 – September 2024 (scaling ongoing into 2025)

Time for Young People is an early intervention and wellbeing service co-designed with young people, colleagues, and external partners through a co-design process (2022–2024). This wasn’t just a design process that led to a report (we have that too!); it resulted in a fully operational service.

We worked closely with mobilisation teams to turn ideas into reality, ensuring continuity between design and delivery. The service now operates in five locations (Newham, Leeds, Gateshead, Torbay, Coventry & Warwickshire) and is scaling across the UK and Wales. It supports young people aged 10–25 to maintain positive wellbeing through easy-access support with no referrals needed.

Impact (Sept 2024 – Mar 2025)

121 young people attended workshops (some transitioned to drop-ins or structured support)
64% (56 of 88) reported improved wellbeing knowledge and skills
102 professionals engaged through partnerships and outreach
2,950 young people reached via awareness events
210 parents/carers supported through community engagement

Early prototype of service model from Blue-sky-thinking-workshop with internal co-design group

Challenge and Our Approach

The challenge presented to the Service Design team was to create an early intervention hub somewhere in the UK. As our team was fairly new to the organisation and not to mention pretty small, we had to navigate the want from the organisation: "Create an early intervention hub" while being true to our process and values of putting young people and the local community in the driving seat. Co-design helped us navigate this challenge and was at the heart of this process bringing together young people, professionals, and partners to shape the process and service.

Internal Collaboration
I facilitated a cross-organisational co-design group of 10 colleagues from Policy, Research, High Value, Practice, and Impact teams including our Director of Young People's Service's. Together, we:

Prioritised key areas for deeper research
Investigated local needs in Newham (e.g., designing for the Global Majority)
Mapped external stakeholders
Ran a blue-sky workshop to explore bold service ideas

This created a strong foundation for service mobilisation and ongoing Test & Learn cycles after launch.

Workshop with Internal co-design group Developing service focus areas and activities.

Young Designers at the core of the design

In parallel, I worked with a group of 4–7 young people (aged 13–19) across 40+ sessions. We explored and created:

Who the service is for: creating compassionate personas
What it offers: activities, workshops, and peer to peer support
How it feels: designing the drop-in experience through storyboards and role-play
Look and feel: mood boards focusing on interiors, and branding with the creative team
Who works there: creating job descriptions and leading recruitment panels
Promotion: co-creating marketing materials and a film telling their story of being a Young Designer.

From Young Designer’s Workshop: What should the staff be like in the new service?

"This project has really inspired me because making change is not the easiest thing, but with projects like this and people that keep on volunteering to help we will get there very soon".

-Young Designer

Young Designer at Time for Young People Service launch September 2024

Community and Stakeholder Engagement

Beyond the core design group, we engaged the wider Newham community through:

A community event in one of Newham's libraries for parents/carers, community members and young people to explore wider needs around wellbeing and ideas for the service
A dinner with local mothers to understand their lived experiences, community assets, opportunities and needs for the new service, including how to make it trustworthy and relevant.
Visits to an Islamic school and colleges to explore faith and cultural considerations
4 workshops with Newham council with the aim of giving them oversight of the process and adding their expertise and knowledge to the design outputs such as our young person personas.
A workshop with the West Ham United Foundation was held to test outreach and pop-up ideas with boys and young men. This engagement inspired the Time for Young People’s service in Newham to create a “test and learn” cycle for improving engagement with this group. As a result, a survey was conducted, and 10 boys and young men were involved to provide feedback and ideas to help shape the service, aiming to increase their and their peers involvement.

Young Designer’s Workshop: Exploring which activities the service should offer.

My Role

My role flexed between driving the Service Design process and ensuring it was strategically informed while being led by insights from young people and the community. A big part of my work was building trust with the Young Designers, who have a very special place in my heart, as they taught me how to be a better and a more inclusive Service Designer, through having to adapt many known approaches to fit their different ages, needs and ways of engaging.

Following the launch in Newham, I shifted focus to scaling the service, creating a standard design process and principles for engaging young people and local communities across the UK. I have also led a review into the model looking at what worked and what didn’t across locations, using insights to refine the model for standardising best practice and for future bids and diverse local needs.

Early visual iteration of the service model

Key Learnings

1. One key element I would approach differently in this project would be to champion and prioritise the development of a digital offer alongside the physical service. Although there was a dedicated budget for utilising a existing digital solution, such as our wellbeing app developed a few years earlier, the budget was too small and our team lacked the capacity to focus on both co-design with young people, the local community, and colleagues, as well as designing a digital component tailored to the model and responsive to local needs. In hindsight, I would have made a strong business case to involve colleagues from the digital team or hire a part-time service designer or UX-designer to ensure the digital offer was fully embedded within the Time for Young People model.

2. Involving internal colleagues through an internal co-design process, especially people who would mobilise and deliver the service helped to imbed service design thinking and how to create test and learn cycles after service launch to continually test and evolve the offer based on evolving trends and needs.

3. Involving internal colleagues also helped the design process to be more inclusive and diverse (EDI) especially within primary and secondary research and workshops to understand the needs of Global Majority and LGBTQ+ communities. However, there is more work, and training needed for the Time model to embed these needs and especially how to make this a safe space for LGBTQ+ young people. I.e. there is more training needed to support trans youth within a single session model.

4. Creating this trust takes time, this must be reflected in the activities through allowing choice and building relationships as well as budgets and timelines. Having a Service Manager or Youth Voice Practitioner from the local area speeds up this process as well as creating and having a standard co-design process with activities and principles in engaging with new local communities.

5. We deliberately involved our Director of Young People’s Services in the co-design group which assisted us in getting audiences with senior leadership to champion and get buy-in for co-designing with young people.

6. Safeguarding, risk assessments, and trauma-informed activities aren't just admin, they're core to delivery and need proper resourcing and capacity. Making the process safe is a core principle of co-designing with young people.

7. I became a certified Workplace Mental Health First Aider via St John Ambulance to better support the team and participants.

8. I thaught myself Kumu which is a data visitation tool and data platform that made it easier to organise complex data such service provision in Newham, into a Service Map highlighting gaps, overlaps, and partnership opportunities. A next step is to see how we can create an accessible template so Service Managers and practitioners can do this themselves.

Come Design with Me!