Part of our Data Journey's research case study series, with Think Social Tech.
July 2025
Streets of Growth is a dynamic grassroots charity delivering youth intervention in Tower Hamlets. They focus on young people aged 15-21 who are engaged in criminal harm and are stuck.
Their model combines street-based outreach with long-term, personalised support. They help young people become resilient. They also support them in returning to education, work, or training.
In the last 2 years, Streets of Growth has been working on how to measure and visualise their impact. They have developed data dashboards in Power BI to visualise data from their CRM.
They can now evidence how their stage-based approach reduces harm. They can also drill down into their data for specific locations or groups of young people. This has revealed patterns in young people’s engagement, resilience, relapse, and recovery.
Sohail Raja, head of Data Strategy at Streets of Growth, shares their learning here.
7 key elements of success
Getting the basics in place
Streets of Growth was largely paper-based before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Like many grassroots organisations, this pushed them to go online. This way, they could keep helping young people during lockdowns.
They turned to CAST for support, who signposted them to Superhighways. Superhighways helped the team set up laptops, cloud storage, and Microsoft 365 licensing.
The relationship was positive and much appreciated by the team. It spurred Streets of Growth on to explore how else digital and data could support their work.
A digital trustee, then a dedicated data role
Sohail, a former trustee and now Head of Data Strategy, brought extensive digital experience from the finance sector.
As a trustee, he supported the adoption of Apricot as their CRM. Later, he took on a pro bono project to improve how they used data.
He is now the Head of Data Strategy, contributing his technical expertise, leadership experience and knowledge of the charity.
Having a dedicated person focused on this makes a big difference
Funding with a commitment to impact measurement
In 2023, Streets of Growth received funding from Impetus. They committed to collecting data about their delivery and their outcomes.
In turn, this would show how young people are better prepared for education, work, and training. Collecting this data pushed Streets of Growth to refine their stage-based intervention model. This in turn, provided a detailed measurement framework.
As a result, Streets of Growth can now track how young people make progress.
Support to learn more about and implement Power Bi
Superhighways played a crucial role in helping Streets of Growth get started with Power BI.
Whilst Soahil had used Power BI before, this was in a corporate setting with a team working for him. He needed to develop practical skills in a short amount of time. Sohail attended their training and Power BI user group.
He also accessed troubleshooting and one-to-one follow-up advice sessions.
We've had a lot of help from Superhighways. This helped get down to the nuts and bolts of the data that we had and our reporting. From this, I was able to extract data from the CRM, clean and transform it.
That's been super helpful to get our Power BI interface up and running.
I picked up tips and tricks from Superhighways on how we can view and use the data. This means our visualisation is really impactful, internally and for our funders.
Sticking with their CRM
By leveraging their CRM, Streets of Growth made a strategic decision to invest in making better use of the data they already had.
Switching systems would be time-consuming and disruptive.
Instead, they prioritised understanding, cleaning and transforming their existing data. This allowed them to generate insights without overburdening the team.
This pragmatic approach paid off.
With Superhighways support, they were able to show clear and compelling evidence of their work. It kept things manageable for a small charity.
Replacing a CRM is a major undertaking. Since we’d already invested in our system, we chose to focus on making better use of it — and we realised the real value would come from focusing on the data itself.
Mapping data workflows and helping the team see the value (culture change)
Sohail needed to understand how best to set up the Power BI dashboard. To do this, he mapped how data was used across different roles, from frontline youth workers to senior managers and funders. Sohail then created a core data extract from their CRM and a Power BI dashboard.
The process of testing this with different leaders and staff was invaluable for gaining support.
They could all see how the dashboard could save them a significant amount of time. Instead of piecing together data from multiple spreadsheets, they now had a shared, accurate dataset ready for funding bids and internal planning.
They could also see how the data reflected the reality of their experiences delivering interventions.
Rather than seeing data as a burden or just being for funders, staff could see its value for their work. Sohail describes this shift as moving from “data as a task” to “data as an enabler.”
The key factor was getting the support of the whole team. This wasn’t just coming from a senior level saying we are going to change everything. It’s being really engaged with the team and they are very supportive. They can see the value. Those little nudges have helped
The impact of data for Streets of Growth
Power BI has enabled Streets of Growth to:
- Reduce staff time spent on reporting to funders
- Make their data visible, showing what interventions are taking place and their impact
- Provide compelling evidence to funders about their impact
- Reveals patterns in engagement, relapse and recovery of the young people they are working with
For example, one programme provided support to girls at Central Foundation Girls’ School who were at risk of exclusion.
Using the dashboard, the team could document their progress from disengagement with school, to GCSE success supporting our Evidence-Led Impact approach
We’re able to drill down to the school a young person attended and trace the intervention work delivered throughout our engagement with them — from the extent of our interactions to their growing resilience.
We can see how quickly they recover from challenging life events, whether those are related to lifestyle or environmental factors, and we’ve observed significant turnarounds, with stronger school engagement and improved educational outcomes.
Looking ahead
Streets of Growth now plan to take their data work further.
They are currently exploring adding alerts, for example when a young person is not progressing or an intervention is not working. They are also considering how to better use qualitative data within this.
More broadly, their ambition is to become a data driven organisation as part of their Street-to-Data initiative . Streets of Growth want to create a research and applied data offer for commissioners, funders and local public services.
Their focus is on underrepresented communities, such as Bangladeshi and Pakistani youth in Tower Hamlets, where little meaningful data exists. By generating meaningful insight, they hope to influence better service provision.
We’re committed to conducting deep analysis and producing research that delivers meaningful insights — research that is tailored both to the intervention work we do and to the specific communities we serve.
Summary
Do you need help on your data journey? Do you want to create a data dashboard or need help with your CRM? If you are a small charity or community organisation in London you can email Superhighways.
You can also:
- Join our Power BI user group
- Read our ‘How to guides for Power Bi’
- Email Sohail Raja, Head of Data Strategy at Streets of Growth about this case study