Themed grant round
A supportive home – helping families to overcome challenges
Run in partnership with Comic Relief. Applications have now closed.
Themed grant round
Run in partnership with Comic Relief. Applications have now closed.
Applications have now closed. Thank you to everyone who helped shape the scope for the round, attended one of our workshops and submitted an application. We’ll announce which projects have been shortlisted in March 2022.
The Youth Endowment Fund exists to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice.
Having a supportive home helps to keep children safe from involvement in violence. Where children live in homes where there’s conflict or domestic abuse, alcohol or substance misuse or where other family members are involved in crime, they’re at higher risk.
That’s why we want to invest in programmes that support families. And that includes building our understanding of what works for children in the care system, who’re significantly overrepresented in the youth justice system.
Which approaches are most effective in helping families and carers to create a supportive home environment for 6 to 14 year-old children (including looked-after children), reducing the likelihood of them becoming involved in violence?
We’ll aim to identify around 5-10 programmes to fund and evaluate. We’re planning to spend between £6 million and £10 million depending on the how well applications meet our criteria.
We are interested in funding and evaluating programmes where the evidence of positive impact on children is promising. In this round we are focusing funding on four main areas:
Please read our application guidance and our prospectus update for the full scope of what programmes we’ll fund in this round. Our original prospectus (available in Welsh) gives more information on our approach to evaluating the programmes we fund and what to expect if you become a YEF funded partner.
You may also want to begin discussing your bid with any partners you’ll want to work with, particularly if you are considering scaling-up your current programme with the help of YEF funding so it can be evaluated robustly.
With our partners at Comic Relief, we’ve been listening to experts working in children’s services, the voluntary sector, in central and local government and the police. We’ve also heard from children and young people with lived or near experience of violence, who told us how they want us to use the £10 million we’ve pledged to invest in this round.
Alongside a detailed review of the existing evidence, your knowledge helped to refine the direction we’ll take in the grant round.
Our conversations with people working to keep children safe – and young people themselves – made it clear that we should focus on helping families. There’s also clear evidence that family support could be effective. But lots of the evidence is international rather than UK-based, and many of the underlying studies have limitations.
By funding programmes in England and Wales, we can build our knowledge of how best to support families, foster carers and children’s homes so that children have a supportive home.
Comic Relief are investing £2 million to help us find out how high-quality family support can help children who are most at risk of becoming involved in violence.
We want to thank Comic Relief for supporting this important area of work.
If you want to find out more about what we’re looking to fund and what the evidence says about family support, you can watch a recording of our introductory workshop:
Applications for the grant round are now open. Please ensure you read both the application guidance and prospectus update before applying.
Read our FAQs or email us on grants@youthendowmentfund.org.uk
Accessible versions of the application form and grant round resources are available on request, please email hello@youthendowmentfund.org.uk.