10to19’s Core Principles
10to19 has had the opportunity to work with multiple stakeholders, including corporates, foundations, families, non-profits, social businesses, government and the media. It has also worked on offerings to the sector addressing what works on-ground and what learnings can be adapted across different contexts.
Some of the core principles followed at 10to19 are:
- Continual centering of adolescent voices and participation across all stages of a program lifecycle
- Addressing all aspects of service provision holistically to strengthen delivery, access, and usage of youth-centric services
- Investing in collective learning
- Integrating GEDI (Gender, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) and intersectionality
- Maintaining accountability to outcomes
- Employing and leveraging cutting-edge solutions
10to19’s journey in building this tool
Understanding the need for greater collaborative efforts
India is currently home to 253 million adolescents whose complex developmental contexts and needs are extremely diverse, ranging from gender inequality to lack of access to education, health services and livelihoods.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a great increase in the number of adolescents experiencing chronic stress and family violence, along with constant home confinement, which significantly impacted their mental health and well-being.
Such a critical situation therefore required early, effective and collaborative action by identifying practices that worked on-ground and scaling those in resource-effective ways to cope with the unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic.
The experience highlighted the importance of acknowledging practitioner-level insight, data and feedback to identify what works on-ground, in addition to the existing resource-intensive methods, and to provide the sector the opportunity to strengthen its current solutioning landscape.
At 10to19, we are committed to uncovering youth-focused solutions. To achieve this, we place great importance on the perspectives and suggestions of young people, and are privileged to have a team of young advisors who guide us on a regular basis. Through conversations with our advisors, sector partners, funders and the government, we realised that there was a need for a tool, that could support and guide organisations and initiatives in identifying what is working for them.
Understanding the applicability and usefulness of the tool
This tool has been developed to support development practitioners and program design and implementation teams to identify promising practices throughout the project lifecycle and to gain insights into what is working. It brings lived realities to the forefront for a more informed and strategic decision-making in order to create better impact.
Interestingly, the tool can also be used to find out what is NOT working, what seems ineffective, and what teams are struggling with to get a sharper understanding of how to make the necessary changes.
The process followed to build the tool
To chalk out a tool that could decode and document the promising practices in the sector, 10to19 engaged with some of its stakeholders, including partners who worked with adolescents, and followed the below steps to arrive at a guided tool:
STEP 1
Focusing on documenting own learnings and ways of identifying promising practices based on years of valuable experience of working as a collaborative.
STEP 2
Once designed internally, taking the roadmap to 10to19’s partner organizations as well as a cohort of young people to validate the process and provide their input in order to improve it.
STEP 3
After receiving feedback, reviewing and further refining the roadmap basis the conversations that had taken place.
Limitations
While the process followed certain academic frameworks and principles such as the development of data collection tools, the information gathered and so on, the tools and the processes have not been previously validated. The data collection tools that were developed for this study were not rigorously tested and evaluated.
Therefore, the following tool is not-
- A scientific framework that will measure the effectiveness of the program
- A tool to be used for carrying out an in-depth program evaluation
- A heavily data-driven framework to identify best practices or high-impact practices that are established using tested frameworks
The organizations that are applying this tool to identify some of their promising practices are encouraged to review this and provide further feedback. Since this is a living and evolving document, the aim is to strengthen it as and when new learnings, inputs, and feedback are received. We acknowledge that this by no means captures the wide variety of work happening in the sector. However, the intent is to enable key players to build on this sample and further solidify their knowledge in the sector.
What is hoped to be achieved through this tool
10to19 is inspired by the limitless potential of the sector to be resilient, sensitive and action-oriented and has seen several crucial efforts led by the government to support a vibrant nonprofit ecosystem; an engaged civil society; a proactive private sector; and rapid developments in technology.
Yet, to achieve India’s ambitious yet necessary targets for sustainable and inclusive development by 2030 and recover from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot more needs to be done. These complex developmental challenges cannot be dealt with in isolation but with effective and collaborative practices that can enable governments, civil society organizations and philanthropists to generate sustainable impact.
This tool has been built with the hopes to facilitate the process of identifying what is working on-ground and understanding the unique practices that can be replicated rapidly. We aim to support organizations to reflect, discuss and review their programs in a resource-efficient manner and to widely share this knowledge of their identified promising practices.
We would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge all those who extended their support to us in the development of this tool including:
Make a Difference, Medha, Enable India, Antarang, Akanksha, FUEL, Quest Alliance, Dream a Dream, Masoom, Sols Arc, CULP
for multiple rounds of conversations and providing their valuable feedback that has helped us to refine and strengthen this tool.
Collaborative Practice is the fourth edition of our Collaborative series
If you’d like to learn more about our previous products and what 10to19 Dasra Adolescent Collaborative does, take a look below:
