Charity announces new partnership

St Basils, Birmingham-based youth homeless charity, has joined forces with Decision Lab, an award-winning technology company, on a special youth project.

Decision Lab solves real-world challenges for some of the biggest and most respected businesses in the UK, and are working with the city charity to help develop understanding of the factors that influence positive outcomes for the young people they support.

The aim of the project is to identify if there are inherent characteristics about young people that make it more or less likely that they will get good outcomes after working with St Basils and its interaction with young people.

Chris Harper, director of operational support for St Basils, said: “We dipped our toe into the waters of data science and machine learning with the wonderful Data Science for Social Good programme in 2022, where they investigated the factors that lead to different probabilities for the young people we work with.

“Whilst it gave us some good insights, we also realised that maybe we weren 't framing the problem correctly, so the opportunity to work with Decision Lab on this same problem with a more coherent data set and more nuanced outcomes was too good to miss. ”

David Buxton, CEO of Decision Lab, said: “We are proud to be partnering with St Basils to help tackle youth homelessness because we believe in their multifaceted and integrated approach to addressing this complex issue.

“We are impressed by their focus on long-term impact for individuals, and their commitment to collecting data to track their progress and inform their work.

“We believe that our data analysis skills in machine learning, simulation, and optimisation are a natural fit for supporting St Basils in their work, and we are excited to work with them to support and discover ways to help young people avoid homelessness. ”

It is hoped that that the results of this work will be another step along St Basils ' journey in using evidence-based analysis to shape their work.