Capacity building grants

The Youth Endowment Fund awarded 45 organisations capacity building grants, totalling £2m. Each received support from one of our learning partners to improve how they demonstrate and articulate their impact.

Here’s what some of our grantees had to say…

Dele, A2Dominion said: “The pandemic has hit young people hard. They’ve not had the chance to access any positive activity. That makes it even more important that partners to work together to deliver the best support for young people and their parents. The Youth Endowment Fund has put us on a path to do just that.”

Sean, CatZero, said: “Having an external research partner has meant we’re clear about what we do, why we do it and who we do it for. As a small organisation, we wouldn’t have been able to afford that support if it hadn’t been for our grant. The understanding we have now will help us apply for more funding to provide longer term support for young people.”

Becky, Children’s Society said: “[The] grant from the Youth Endowment Fund [has been] so valuable… It’s helping us to demonstrate how a really complex piece of work makes a difference and to know how to do the best by the children we support.”

Mike, Commando Joe’s said: “The grant from the Youth Endowment Fund has been transformative for Commando Joe’s. The value of independent research has been incredible. It means we understand the difference we’re making on teachers, pupils and the community – it’s helped us to show the value of what we do.”

Joanne, Pact said: “Receiving a grant from the Youth Endowment Fund has meant that we’ve been able to commission independent experts to help us develop our project. They’ve helped us to test what we think we know and resolve potential issues early on.”

Neil, Peace Foundation said: “The Peace Foundation runs quite a complicated intervention to support children and young people and it can be difficult to explain our impact. So when we were offered the opportunity for support from the Youth Endowment Fund to work with Ipsos Mori, we jumped at the chance.

The team at Ipsos Mori have challenged us and helped us to develop a structure to our project that really works.  This’ll all help us to grow and support more young people, because we can show our referral partners the benefit of working with us.”

Bruce, Portsmouth County Council said: “We were so pleased to receive the capacity building grant from the Youth Endowment Fund. Quite a lot of the time funding is short term. The Fund appealed to us because it’s a ten-year investment in solving a problem by learning about what works. That’s something we wanted to be a part of.”

Theo, Restorative Justice for All said: “Our grant from the Youth Endowment Fund gave us time to review the infrastructure we need. In my experience, that’s pretty unique…The support we had from Kings College London has helped us understand how we can rigorously evaluate our restorative justice interventions, and clearly show how we can create positive futures for our young people.”

Graeme, Right to Succeed said: “It’s been really empowering. The grant has enabled us to focus on what learning should look like. We’ve moved from a group of individuals who are curious and constantly want to learn to an organisation that has a clear Learning Framework. This provides us with the internal structures and processes to take the learning from our work in one community and apply it to benefit another.”

Stu from RiseUp said: “The grant’s helped us to step back and understand what we do well and what needs tweaking. Staff in our organisation have lived experience and they know how to run a project. What our research partners RealWorth brought was help with strategic planning. It means that we’ve now got clear aims and objectives and we know what we need to do to achieve them.”

Richard, Safer London, said: “It’s been energising and there’s a lot of enthusiasm from the staff. It’s really timely to look at yourselves in the mirror and ask, ‘What could we be doing differently?’ It’s helping build a culture where we continually look at how we can make a bigger impact.”

Deputy City Mayor Councillor John Merry, Salford City Council said: “The Youth Endowment Fund offered us the chance to test an early intervention model. By working with our research partner, we’ve been able to think about the best partnership model, which professionals should be involved, how to measure success and, in the long run, how a successful scheme might be rolled out  across the whole of Greater Manchester.”

Marie, SoCo Music Project, said: “The capacity building grant and support has been transformative. It’s given us the space and time to reflect upon the impact of our work and really think about what we want to do.”

Stuart, Streetgames said: “This grant will mean we can champion the importance of local, trusted organisations in their communities. We’ll be able to show their value, which is so important to help them grow. That way, they can make an even bigger difference to the young people in their areas.”

Caleb, The Enthusiasm Trust said: “We were a bit scatter gun about how we used our data to portray our message. The support has made it easier for us to talk about our approach in a compelling way. This is golden, because now we’re speaking the funders’ language. Even if they’ve never seen or heard about us before, they can look at the work we’ve done and understand what we do and the difference we make.” 

Tim, XLP said: “We were excited to be awarded a capacity building grant from the Youth Endowment Fund. It’s given us the opportunity to strengthen our work by getting some external, objective insight into our work to keep children in school and out of gangs.

It’s helped to see the value in what we do. And we’ve got a clearer understanding the mix of short and long-term interventions that’ll be most valuable for the young people we work with.”