About Us

Planet Youth is a programme focused on improving young people’s health, wellbeing, and relationships.  It is based on the Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM), a primary substance use prevention process tool where the key ingredient is data-driven collaboration via community engagement, family- and school involvement and pro-social positive youth development. This includes, schools, parents, carers, businesses, local government public services.  The model has been developed by Planet Youth, a research consultancy in Iceland that is now supporting the implementation of its model in with communities throughout the world. 

In 2019 a small group of partnerships in five local authority areas joined together with Winning Scotland, to develop and undertake a proof of concept implementation of the approach in order to gauge its suitability in the Scottish context, supported initially by funding from Baillie Gifford. In the wake of the first cycle of activity, Scottish Government funding of £1.5m was awarded to Winning Scotland to coordinate and facilitate a two-year pilot programme running to March 2025, to assess more robustly the potential of Planet Youth in Scotland to drive positive system change around upstream prevention and benefit, in time, all of Scotland’s young people.  Six local Coalitions are currently participating in the pilot, which will be subject to a robust evaluation.  A small central team has been established within Winning Scotland to lead the programme development and implementation work, and more information can be found here.