Blog
The Neighbourhood Fund puts local communities at the centre of preventing youth violence. Instead of designing solutions from afar, the fund supports people who know their neighbourhood best, residents, local organisations, and young people themselves, to decide:
- what needs to change
- who needs to be involved
- how best to reach young people in their community
To do this, the Fund invests in five neighbourhoods that have experienced some of the highest and most concentrated levels of youth violence:
- Birmingham: Lozells and Newtown led by Aston Villa Foundation
- Bradford: Bowling and Barkerend led by Born in Bradford
- Cardiff: Butetown and Grangetown led by Citizen’s UK
- Norfolk: Nelson Ward/Central and Northgate Wards led by Right to Succeed
- Manchester: Cheetham Hill led by Young Manchester
How the Neighbourhood Fund Works
Each site brings together a partnership of local groups under a lead coordinator (listed above), whose role is to build relationships, involve young people, and make sure community voices shape decisions.
The sites move through four key stages, feasibility, discovery, co-design, and delivery:
- Feasibility – selecting specific neighbourhoods for intervention based on data and community insight.
- Discovery – listening to the community to understand potential causes of violence and local priorities, including forming a steering group.
- Co-design – developing and agreeing an action plan based on local insight and evidence.
- Delivery – putting ideas into practice, learning, and adapting.
With plans that can run for up to five years, the Fund empowers neighbourhoods to take meaningful, long-term action, creating safer spaces for young people.
Where are we now?
The five sites began developing their plans in 2021 and started implementing their action plans in 2023.
Alongside delivery, an ongoing evaluation is underway combining:
- an impact evaluation – to test whether, over time, this approach helps reduce youth violence in these neighbourhoods, and
- an implementation and process evaluation – to understand what delivery looks like on the ground and how community-led delivery works in practice.
Whilst we’re still a few years away from publishing the impact findings, our evaluation partners at Nottingham Trent University and Liverpool John Moores University have been working with us to publish annual reports.
Most recently, our Year 2 report (published in October 2025) reveals several early insights.
- The Neighbourhood FundImplementation and Process evaluation
The Neighbourhood Fund
Understanding if and how empowering people to make decisions about their local neighbourhoods can prevent children from becoming involved in violence.
What we’re learning
- Community-led projects adapt to local needs
A key strength of taking a ‘community-led solution’ approach is adaptability.
Across the different sites, delivery partners have been listening closely to young people and adjusting activities based on their feedback.
The evaluation found that activities were shaped to reflect community needs and identities, for example:
- creating sessions specifically for Muslim girls
- scheduling activities around Ramadan
- offering language support to newly arrived families
- working with trusted community organisations, including mosques and churches
By shaping activities around the needs and experiences of young people, the approach encourages spaces that feel inclusive and responsive.
These adaptations were reported to support engagement, particularly among young people who often face barriers to accessing services.
2. Building Partnerships and Youth Voice
Several sites have expanded their steering groups to include schools, local organisations, and community leaders, helping activities connect more closely with local needs and tap into a wider range of resources and young people.
Young people are also contributing directly to decisions in several ways:
- participating in advisory panels
- taking part in co-design sessions
- influencing which activities get funded
Steering group members and delivery partners described activities as feeling more relevant when young people contribute to shaping them. Partners reported that giving youth a voice in the design and delivery of activities has led to better attendance and a sense of empowerment.
3. Supportive relationships matter
One-to-one mentoring and safe spaces were highlighted by young people as particularly valuable. Many participants described feeling more confident and supported in safe spaces where they could engage without fear of judgment. Whether through mentoring or group activities, youth workers’ ability to build trust has been key to keeping young people engaged and invested in the programmes. This is promising based on the YEF Toolkit which says that mentoring is effective in both reducing crime and the behaviours associated with crime and violence.
| Estimated impact | approaches | evidence quality |
|---|---|---|
| Mentoring |
4. Challenges remain – especially around sustainability
While the programme is making progress, there are real pressures:
- Funding: Some organisations struggle to secure long-term funding once the initial funding runs out and struggle to meet the growing demand.
- Capacity: Scaling up programmes and managing them effectively is difficult without additional support and resources. Additionally, data collection and monitoring remain a challenge, especially for smaller partners, making it difficult to track progress and demonstrate the effects.
- Reliance on coordinators: Lead coordinators have been central to delivery, running meetings, problem-solving, supporting monitoring, and recruiting partners. Many sites rely heavily on their coordinator, which raises questions about sustainability when the role ends.
These challenges affect how confident partners feel about sustaining work beyond the life of the fund.
5. Early Signs of Positive Change
Although it is too early to assess effects on youth violence, young people in interviews and focus groups have shared that they feel the programme has:
- boosted their confidence
- improved their well-being
- increased access to opportunities
- helped them build stronger peer relationships.
These early insights are helping us understand what it takes for communities to lead meaningful, sustained activity to support young people.
Read the full report here.
Looking ahead
The five sites will continue to deliver their action plans with staggered end dates spanning 2026 to 2028.
We’ll continue to publish annual reports to showcase the learning from the Neighbourhood Fund – with our next report expected to be published in October 2026.
In late 2028/early 2029, the final report will explore whether this approach of empowering local communities is effective for reducing youth violence in high risk neighbourhoods.
Further reading
- Year 1 & 2 evaluation reports: The Neighbourhood Fund | Youth Endowment Fund
- Evaluation study plan: NF_ESPSAP.pdf
- Area leaders programme: Area Leaders Programme (ALP) | Youth Endowment Fund