Reducing Youth Offending Social Bond Pilot Process Evaluation

Genesis Youth Trust (Genesis) is a Charitable Trust and a hybrid organisation made up of six New Zealand Police (Police) paid staff and 39 Trust paid personnel. In 2017, Oranga Tamariki–Ministry for Children (Oranga Tamariki) entered into a six-year agreement with Genesis to deliver an intensive programme to reduce the frequency and severity of youth reoffending for a maximum of 1,000 participants. The target group was rangatahi with a Police Alternative Action Plan and who had a medium to high risk of reoffending according to the YORST Police risk screening tool.

Investors provided a $6 million initial investment to finance the Social Bond: The New Zealand Superannuation Fund, Mint Asset Management (a private fund manager) and the Wilberforce Foundation (a private philanthropic investor).

This report is a process evaluation of the Social Bond Pilot

Oranga Tamariki was directed by Cabinet to evaluate the effectiveness of the Social Bond Pilot. Because of the early stage of the pilot, this evaluation two-years after the start of the pilot is a process evaluation with two main areas of interest:

• How the Social Bonds contractual arrangement is operating
• How the Genesis Youth Trust programme is operating.

An intervention logic model and evaluation framework provided the theoretical foundation for the evaluation. The process evaluation triangulated information from:

• Interviews with government agency stakeholders, Genesis frontline staff and Board members, external stakeholders (including trainer, Police, Genesis Social Bond partners and the investors) and one rangatahi and whānau.
• Genesis programme administrative data and a qualitative study completed by Synergia of the referral process with Police frontline staff.