The National Council for Voluntary Youth Services has created a community interest company which will bid for public service contracts on behalf of collectives of its members.

The new company will be named “yeah” and will act as a platform to facilitate collective bidding for service contracts on behalf of members.

It will also broker relationships between members and non-members to help promote activities and projects involving young people.

yeah also plans to act as a trading arm of the organisation. It will sell and licence products and services including training events.

Key products that NCVYS will licence and sell through yeah include Sound Systems, an accredited scheme for voluntary and community organisations working with young people to develop and improve the implementation of their safeguarding policies, and Young Partners, a regional awards programme which celebrates young people’s involvement in decision-making within voluntary and community youth organisations and projects.

Beth Parker, NCYVS’s director of service development, said: “After months of hard work, we’re hugely excited to have yeah up and running. Our vision is that it will help embed an enterprise culture across our network and allow us to tap into the collective strength of our members.

"Our network of 180 members has huge potential and experience but it can be difficult to release this without a commercially-oriented platform. yeah will allow us to bring together all the different skills of our members and act as a facilitator for bidding on contracts and projects.”

"Our membership is at its best when it works together so I’m delighted to be taking this to the next stage through yeah.”