Applications in email, screening in spreadsheets, evidence everywhere at audit time. We built one place where the whole youth programme year happens — and now offer it to organisations running programmes of their own.
Anyone who has run a youth employment programme at scale knows the truth of it: the placements are the point, but the year is won or lost in the administration around them. Applications arrive by email, screening lives in one spreadsheet, attendance in another, payslips in a folder, and the evidence an oversight body will one day ask for is scattered across all of them. A **youth programme management system** should mean the end of that scatter — one place where the whole programme year happens. That is what we've built, what already runs real programme years across the Bighearts network, and what we now offer to organisations running programmes of their own. ## Where Youth Programme Administration Breaks Down The failure mode is rarely dramatic. It's a slow accumulation of parallel records: an intake list that no longer matches the placement list, a host file updated on someone's laptop, a month-end report assembled by copying between tabs late at night. Every handover multiplies the versions, and every audit or claim becomes an exercise in reconstruction. The cost isn't only time. When records disagree, the programme's credibility is what suffers — with sponsors, with oversight bodies, and with the young people whose year it is. A programme that cannot show its evidence cleanly is treated as if the work never happened, however good the work was. ## One Record, From Application to Absorption The programme engine runs the year as one continuous record. Youth **apply online** and land in an intake pool for review. A pipeline carries each person through screening, enrolment, and placement at a host organisation. Monthly statuses are tracked through the year, and exits and absorption are recorded at close-out — so the outcome story is captured as it happens, not assembled afterwards from memory and old emails. Learners aren't an afterthought in someone else's admin tool, either. Each gets their own home in the system: announcements, schedule, payslips, and course material, plus a **My Journey** page showing their progression through the year. The people being developed can see their own development — which changes how a programme feels from the inside. ## Evidence, Captured Once Each youth's documents live in one file-home and are reused wherever they're needed. Completeness checks show what's missing while there's still time to fix it. Verification packs download when compliance asks. Formal period reports go out to sponsors and oversight bodies as proper documents — generated from the same record the team works in every day, and current because the year was captured as it happened. > The compliance file builds itself as the year happens — captured once, reused everywhere, never reconstructed. The money side runs in the same place: project costing, invoices and payments, cashflow statements, living budgets, and bank-feed matching through Xero. When the data needs to travel, projects export to PDF, Excel, and CSV. ## One Login, Many Views A programme year involves administrators, consultants, host businesses, and learners — and none of them should see everything. The platform's member surface, **the Village Dashboard**, gives each role its own view behind one login, with every screen permission-scoped: who you are and which organisation you belong to decides what you see. The same platform gives an organisation its public face too: a full branded website run from the system, and a Village Profile in the Bighearts Digital Village, where visitors ask questions in plain language and get sourced, grounded answers from live AI search. The engine behind the programme and the public presence in front of it are one system, not an integration project. ## Built Lean, and Honest About It One small team plus AI agents builds and operates all of this — which is why the system can be configured around your programme without enterprise-software overheads. We're just as plain about what isn't live yet: matching suggestions and a support layer that notices what a member needs next are things we're building toward, not things we offer today. When they're live, we'll say so. **Intelligence with intent** includes the discipline of not overclaiming. ## Talk to Us About Your Programme Bighearts Online builds and operates the platform behind the Bighearts Village, and offers it to organisations running youth programmes of their own — learnerships, YES placements, and year-long placement programmes, from a first cohort to a multi-site operation. An engagement starts with your programme's shape: we configure the system around it and onboard your team onto the Village Dashboard. If your programme year still lives in spreadsheets, we're glad to show you what one place looks like.