By Alex Hutchison (INCLUDE+ Network Fellow, hosted by YouthLink Scotland)
In late 2025, I was offered a fellowship hosted by YouthLink Scotland and funded by the INCLUDE+ Network to explore how youth work organisations partner with technology companies without losing the focus on children and young people’s rights, inclusion, safety, and dignity.
I’ve spent the last few years working at the intersection of academia, the third sector, the public sector and industry on data-driven challenges affecting children and young people, so ethical cross-sector partnering is not new territory for me. I went in with my eyes open as to the impact competitive funding landscapes, the notion that a technology sector allegedly likes to ‘move fast and breaks things’, and power imbalances can have on these partnerships before they’ve even begun.
This blog shares how the project got off the ground, what got in the way, and the moments that ultimately shaped a practical toolset designed to help youth organisations approach youth work–technology partnerships with more confidence and clarity.
Getting Underway
With an end goal of producing guidance for the youth work sector, it was clear that a deep and reflective approach was needed to explore the complexity of ethics, power imbalances, governance, and cultural differences while also resulting in usable products that busy practitioners would actually pick up and put into practice.
The IN+ Principles encouraged me to lean into a design thinking approach, guided by the Design Council’s Double Diamond: Discover – Define – Develop – Deliver. In practice, that meant starting wide, listening, mapping, and testing assumptions, before narrowing down into prototypes and, finally, a refined set of tools.
The work drew from four evidence streams that were intentionally iterative:
- Desk research to map partnership models, common ethical pitfalls, such as power imbalances, and recurring needs.
- Semi-structured interviews across both sectors, with consistent questions to surface differences in language, incentives, and expectations.
- A large co-creation activity at the YouthLink Scotland Digital Youth Work Conference to validate themes quickly and test mock scenarios.
- A prototype validation workshop to critique and refine tool ideas through structured feedback.
What was really important to me in getting perspectives and insights through interviews was to create an environment of openness, so that people felt able to tell me some of their more unspoken views on partnership risk, reputation, and power. There were some unrepeatable/sensitive stories told, as a result and this really help deepen the underlying insights that went into building the guidelines.
Not all plain sailing
A key element of the design thinking approach that I was taking was to hear perspectives from both sectors. While contact with the youth work sector was relatively (although not always) smooth, thanks to the support of YouthLink Scotland, the same can’t be said about the tech sector. I have a solid black book of contacts either in or adjacent to the tech sector, so I quickly got to work in trying to find the right people at those organisations to feed into this work. While some contacts (or contacts of contacts) were quick to come back and agree to giving an hour of their valuable time for an interview, others were non-committal or unattainable. I spent quite a lot of time chasing fruitless leads, who kept promising to make time, but never quite converting. I did my best to market the interview as an opportunity to self-reflect on organisational values and processes, but when busy people are busy – it’s hard to get their pro bono time. If anyone has any secret tips on how to persuade someone to give an hour of their time for a wider research project, then please get in touch!
Another interesting item to contend with is the diversity of opinion (or maybe even trust) in the youth work sector towards the technology sector. This was strongly represented due the wider co-creation activity conducted on Menti at the Digital Youth Work Conference. Interviews with youth work representatives were predominantly with those who already had experience in partnership with the technology sector. There my interview insights were somewhat skewed towards those who already had some faith in being in a partnership. What I learned in the wider co-creation activities, and through testing with some fake scenarios, is that some youth work organisations or representatives are not open to or ready to work with the technology sector. Perhaps its not “all about the money, money, money”, Jessie J.
From the outset, a key ask from YouthLink Scotland, and the wider youth work sector, was how can we help organisations find technology partners. What became apparent very quickly is that the ‘meet cute’ for organisations, is highly incidental and therefore very difficult to replicate or orchestrate. For some, it was sitting next to someone at an entirely unrelated event, for others it was a chance conversation whilst supervising their kids at a skate park. This makes it challenging to offer advise / incorporate into guidelines on how to broach organisations for partnership engagement. Perhaps the key top tip here is ‘get out and about’ and ‘be curious about people’.
A few key learnings that shaped the way the guidelines are structured
Tech partnerships aren’t just “another private sector partnership” – they come with different stakes. Because children and young people are living through an unprecedented wave of datafication and digitalisation, partnering with tech can feel more relevant (and more complicated) than partnering with other private sector organisations. Done well, these partnerships can open up opportunities beyond funding: digital skills, literacy, access to mentors, and pathways into emerging careers. Interestingly, money wasn’t always the headline in my conversations with youth organisations, due to the variety of ways that a partnership with technology organisations can support youth work practice.
In practice, this means don’t start the conversation with “what can you give us?” but with “what shared purpose could exist here”, and how it benefits young people in real, concrete ways.
Power is not as simple as ‘big company vs small charity’ – it’s more nuanced. Going in, I had a neat David-and-Goliath picture in my head. In reality, power sits in lots of places: reputation, networks, geography, technical expertise, language, and even the scarcity of available partners. A rural organisation captured this well illustrating that when potential partners are thin on the ground, negotiating leverage shifts before you’ve even said hello. On the other hand, I also heard stories of well-connected youth organisations holding significant power, even when working with large multinationals. I also saw hints of internal power imbalances and territoriality, where teams or individuals protect their patch, which can quietly shape behaviour and decision-making.
Ideally, make power visible early. Ask simple questions like: Who benefits, who decides, and what does each side really want out of this?
Governance sounds dull – but it’s the difference between a successful and a regretted partnership
Governance is rarely the exciting part of the story, right up until it’s missing. Across partnership examples, the make-or-break factors were consistently human and practical: shared purpose, clear roles, milestones, decision-making routes, safeguarding protocols, data considerations, and a single point of contact on both sides. Without that scaffolding, scope drift, delays, and “lost in translation” moments become predictable, and trust erodes. A lot of partnership success came down to which humans were involved, what their motivators were, and whether accountability existed at an individual level (not just organisationally).
Even if you’re starting small, start formally: clarify scope, set a cadence, agree decision rights, and write down what good looks like.
Innovation is exciting but it can unintentionally be exclusionary
There’s real enthusiasm for AI, VR, and game-based learning, but also a consistent caution: novelty can raise anxiety, “cool tech” can crowd out outcomes, and accessibility gets forgotten until it’s too late. Innovation is welcome, but only when it’s purpose-driven, inclusive at group scale, and supported by the right facilitation and safeguarding.
Therefore, it’s important to treat innovation as a means, not an end. Ask: Is this accessible? Can we deliver it safely at scale? Does it support outcomes young people actually care about?
Relationship-building is hard to standardise.
I knew people would want a ‘find your ideal tech partner’ guide, but I didn’t find a replicable recipe for how relationships begin. The truth is, those first connections can be wonderfully random: sitting next to someone at an event, a chance chat in your community, a mutual contact. That’s hard to turn into guidance without pretending there’s a formula. What we could do was create a ‘Getting Started Guide’ – something that supports organisations at the earliest stage of considering a partnership, before they’re ready to assess risk or draft agreements.
I would recommend focussing less on finding the perfect partner and more on being ready for the first conversation: know your purpose, your red lines, and what you can offer.
Tools are only useful when they’re positioned as a journey, not yet another a stack of paperwork
At the prototyping stage, I was keen to stop the toolkit feeling overwhelming. The eight prototypes made sense to me as a designer, but to practitioners, it risked feeling like “another toolkit” to file away. What helped was organising the guidance as a partnering journey, so it mirrors how real decisions unfold: clarify your value, understand risk, set principles, then formalise agreements.
In designing guidelines and toolkits, its key to make it easy for people to get started. Give them a sequence of steps to follow.
The end result
The design process moved from synthesis to prototypes to refinement, taking into the account the above learnings. Insights were organised across eight thematic areas (including Values & Ethics, Power & Trust, Risks & Barriers, Practical Guidelines, and Accountability & Governance), and tensions between sectors across these areas were addressed in the design of the end products.
With feedback from a supportive set of youth work practitioners, YouthLink Scotland and the INCLUDE+ Network, the final toolset was refined down to:
- Getting Started Guide – A guide which breaks down youth work / technology partnerships into practical achievable steps. This guide sets the scene for the other four tools.
- Unique Value Blueprint (with How‑To guide) – A set of six questions with sub-prompts to use as a reflective exercise within the organisation to identify the unique selling points that you bring to any potential partnership. These questions can also be posed to a potential partner.
- Ethical Partnership Charter (with How‑To guide) – A example / editable / ready-to-use charter for both partners to agree to. This charter has ten charter statements against categories of Purpose, People, Practice and Partnership.
- Ethical Partnerships Risk Decision Tree (with Linear Version and How‑To guide) – A series of decision-making questions relating to partnership risks, to support evaluation of a potential partnership.
- Ethical Partnership Agreement Checklist (with How‑To guide) – A quick reference tool to ensure both parties entering into the partnership have considered all key agreement elements.
If there’s a single design philosophy underneath all of this, it’s to make ethical reflection practical – not a compliance exercise. The set of guidelines provides a set of prompts and structures that help you ask the hard questions early, when they’re still easy to act on.
What’s next
An adoption webinar is planned for early May 2026 to introduce the tools and support uptake. YouthLink Scotland will continue to promote the guidance while gathering insights on how it’s used in practice, feeding learning into wider evidence-building efforts. There’s also an idea to create an innovative tool that support practitioners in using the guidelines – think bespoke LLM with chat functionality.
If you’re a youth organisation considering a partnership: my suggestion is to start with intent-setting and the Getting Started Guide, before you start building anything. We’d love to hear back from anyone that practically applies the tools, or indeed if you need any support in doing so.