My Fellowship has significantly increased my confidence in embracing complexity.
Policy Challenge
How can Youth Endowment Fund research and address systemic challenges, focusing on child criminal exploitation, considering regional variation, capacity constraints, and ownership ambiguity in criminal business models?
Learning Journey
Criminal business models and markets are best understood as living ecosystems. They respond and adapt to changes in the environment. The ripple effects of environmental changes are not always predictable or immediately obvious. This poses significant challenges for those of us tasked with protecting vulnerable people from harm and / or preventing and disrupting criminality. How can we be confident that our interventions will have a net positive impact, and won’t inadvertently displace risk to more hidden, harmful places? How can we get better at predicting the ways in which criminal business models might respond not only to our interventions, but also to factors such as new technologies or changing geopolitics?
Prior to starting my Fellowship, I knew that a systems approach was needed, but I wasn’t sure what this meant in practice. Through my Fellowship I have structured my thinking and learnt about new tools and methodologies. Meeting with a wide range of experts who, across many different fields, have been responsible for managing significant and complex risks has offered invaluable insights.

During her Policy Fellowship Jo Reilly was Criminal Justice Evidence and Change Lead at the Youth Endowment Fund.
Impact
Ultimately my Fellowship has significantly increased my confidence in embracing complexity. The stakes are high – when things go wrong vulnerable people can experience significant harm. We need to tolerate levels of uncertainty about causal relationships when evaluating complex system interventions and system change. We need to tolerate levels of risk - it’s likely that vulnerable children will always be at some risk of exploitation. But we cannot tolerate complacency or fatalism in the design of our system responses to child criminal exploitation. The work is undoubtedly challenging, but systemic improvements can and must be made, and there is significant cross-disciplinary expertise available for us to draw on. I feel very energised by my Policy Fellowship and am very grateful for it.