Co-design brings together lived experience, lived expertise and professional experience to learn from each other and make things better - by design.

(McKercher, 2020)

At UnLtd, we believe that social entrepreneurs should be at the heart of everything that we do, and that people with lived experience of a social issue are best placed to address it. That’s why we’ve been working with social entrepreneurs to co-design our Funding Futures Programme.

In 2024, we set up the Funding Futures Programme in partnership with the Co-op Foundation and Phoenix Group. The programme aims to find, fund and support young social entrepreneurs (16-30) with the most impactful ideas to help those sidelined by the financial system.

Over a six-month design phase, we actively listened to more than 35 young people from across the UK and worked closely with 10 of them over three days to co-design a support package grounded in their lived experience.

This co-design journey challenged us to think critically about how we can do this meaningfully and to try entirely new ways of inviting our social entrepreneurs to participate in the development of our work. It inspired us to keep co-designing with young people beyond the design phase and during the delivery of the programme, too. This means that young people continue to be involved with improving and adapting the programme and helps us to continuously learn about what good co-design looks like for UnLtd.

In this blog, we share some of our key reflections and good practice we developed through this co-design journey.

1. Building a sense of belonging right from the start is key to inclusive co-design

When we started planning this co-design journey, we knew it was crucial to create a culture of safety, respect, and belonging as a foundation for meaningful co-design.

We identified our co-design participants by sharing an open invitation. Following the expressions of interest, we invited 10 young people from a diverse range of backgrounds and at different stages in their entrepreneurial journeys to take part. They had the opportunity to have 1-2-1 calls and attend an online welcome session, both intended to build relationships, ensure everyone’s safety and comfort, and build a foundation of belonging with the wider group.

Then, throughout the three co-design workshops, we focused heavily on creating an environment where the young people participating felt heard and respected. We took action to:

• Listen actively and respond quickly: we openly invited feedback, and when participants suggested changes, or expressed discomfort, we acted on them quickly – from adding more inclusive pieces to our Lego kit, to ensuring that a hot lunch was available.

• Communicate flexibly: using multiple channels, including WhatsApp, emails, 1-2-1 calls and QR code surveys, meant that participants were able to engage in the ways that suited them best.

• Try to flatten power dynamics: by co-creating our ways of working and values, acknowledging the value of their lived experience, and by inviting two youth organisations (our ‘inclusion partners’), whose role was to ensure young people were being heard, encourage and support participation and hold us to account.

Young people appreciated our efforts. They told us: “You did everything right. You listened to everything we said and met what was asked”, and 99% of participants’ responses said that they felt that their voice and opinions had been listened to.

Taken together, these intentional actions all contributed to an atmosphere and culture of respect, safety and active listening – and a space where young people felt safe enough to speak up and be heard.

2. It’s not just about designing something new… but also about playing, learning and truly working relationally.

Design isn’t just about developing new processes or solutions but rather about how we make these happen. Through the co-design journey, we learned that making space for playfulness and connection was central to our ability to work well together and to make the programme happen. And when we shifted our focus from rigid agendas to genuine connection, we saw participation and confidence grow.

For instance, having a ‘free space’ at the end of each workshop gave participants time to process ideas on their own terms, build relationships with each other, and engage more meaningfully. We also did a bunch of fun activities which helped break down barriers and create an environment where young people felt safe to express themselves.

In the end, these weren’t just a ‘nice-to-have’— participants’ feedback showed us how investing time on connecting with each other, resulted in everyone participating in a way that felt safe to them, making our co-design group flourish.

Because of this, the young people we worked with didn’t just contribute to the programme—they became part of it. Some continued engaging beyond the co-design journey, from receiving an UnLtd Award to joining the programme’s Advisory Group, ensuring that their voices remain embedded in our work.

3. Planning for and doing co-design requires a significant investment – but it is worth it.

Creating a genuinely inclusive co-design process took more time, effort, and resources than we’d anticipated—but the results were worth it.

It was important to us to create an inclusive, accessible environment for young co-designers not just during the sessions but especially outside of them, ensuring young people had all the necessary tools to meaningfully engage with the process. To remove barriers, we:

• Held 1-to-1 meetings to understand individual needs and support accessibility.

• Covered travel, accommodation, and accessibility requirements so no one was excluded.

• Ensured that venues had everything the participants needed – from accessible spaces and quiet rooms, to sockets to charge phones and laptops.

Whilst we underestimated how much planning and logistical support was needed to ensure every young person could fully participate, the result of our approach was that participants felt valued, respected, and more motivated to contribute. Beyond shaping the programme, young people’s input and the processes we had to put in place to build such participation infrastructure around them challenged us to rethink our own internal processes—from our communications to our safeguarding policies.

While we are still learning, we’ve learned that putting in time and work upfront goes a long way to making co-design more inclusive, accessible, and valuable for young co-designers, so the process is meaningful and respectful of the input asked of participants. We now have a clearer picture of what needs to be implemented to truly co-design, and how much of our time and resources that takes. This is allowing us to manage this better internally, as well as setting clearer expectations with our partners and everyone involved.

4. Co-design will not always look the same and might not always be the right answer

Not every aspect of a programme can - or should always - be fully co-designed. Through this work, we learned that the key is knowing when to invite participation and in setting clear boundaries.

When it came to co-designing the Funding Futures Programme, we didn’t get to start from a completely blank canvas. Some decisions - such as our grant sizes and award-making processes – were pre-determined by our strategic priorities and our funders.

As we begun planning the co-design, we had extensive conversations about what could be shaped from scratch and therefore how much power we could share with the young people.

Whilst as a team we had a strong sense of what we could and couldn’t build from scratch, we learned we could have communicated this more clearly with our group of young co-designers and funders from the get-go.

As a result of this, in some of our most recent work, we’ve introduced clearer briefs outlining what is ‘open’ vs. ‘fixed’ and better defining the boundaries within which we’re inviting our social entrepreneurs to co-design with us. This is pushing us to be even more transparent about the internal workings of our operations.

Ultimately, we learned that co-design cannot be an all-or-nothing approach.

Understanding co-design as a spectrum, helped us to stop feeling defeated at the idea that we might not ever be able to fully delegate authority on every aspect of our work. By embracing nuance, we’ve moved beyond the pressure of delivering ‘perfect’ co-design. It encouraged us to think about ‘how much’ co-design can we embed within our work and focus on making participation inclusive and meaningful, wherever it happens.

Since October 2024, we’re incredibly proud of having funded and supported 21 social entrepreneurs through the Funding Futures Programme.

On top of creating a support offer that truly reflects young people’s needs and is evolving with them and their ventures; by co-designing with young people, we were also able to strengthen our messaging, branding and outreach strategies to reach more marginalised communities.

But our co-design work isn’t over! We are committed to build a living programme that evolves with our social entrepreneurs’ needs and barriers. We are currently doing this with an Advisory Group made of six young people and our partners at Co-op Foundation; and hosting a series of co-design workshops with the social entrepreneurs we have funded to improve specific elements of our support together. Young people are also at the heart of our award-making processes, playing a key role in assessing applications and helping us improve our equitable and inclusive approach.

We’re continuously looking for new and better ways to co-design with our social entrepreneurs and we’d love to hear from others in this space!

If you are members of London Funders, and would like to hear directly from the team and the young people involved in this work, join us at the Festival of Learning’s online session - Co-designing better funding programs with and for young people - on the 10th June.

If you’d like to learn more about what we learned through designing the Funding Futures Programme, follow this link.

If you’d like to dig deeper into this work, you can read our design phase report here.