Five local areas selected to each receive up to £1 million to invest in preventing young people’s involvement in crime
The Youth Endowment Fund announces more detail on their plans to empower local people to make decisions about what’s right for their neighbourhood
The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) has announced the five hyperlocal areas in England and Wales (either a single council ward or a neighbourhood) where they will support local communities to spend up to £1 million to protect children from crime. Each area will be funded to explore the unique challenges and opportunities its communities are facing, and work with local people to design and pilot new solutions.
The YEF want to find out how local residents’ knowledge and buy-in can help to secure lasting change for young people. A lot of crime happens in very specific local areas. To make a difference, many believe that it’s essential to work with the young people affected and the people and organisations who live and work there – they know their communities best. They can also help make sure that interventions reach the people who need them. That’s why the YEF is investing in small local areas through their Neighbourhood Fund, a programme that puts community engagement and partnership at the heart of efforts to prevent crime.
Today, the YEF has announced exactly where it will make their first Neighbourhood Fund investments. It follows a robust analysis carried out in 2021 to select the target cities or counties: Birmingham, Bradford, Cardiff, Manchester and Norfolk. These places provide an opportunity to work at a hyperlocal level with local authorities, commissioned agencies and residents in both urban and rural/coastal settings.
For each area, the YEF has commissioned a specialist community research organisation to work closely with local partners to find out exactly where there’s the biggest opportunity to empower local residents to make change. The commissioned organisations are: Birmingham Voluntary Service Council (BVSC) for Birmingham; Social Finance for Manchester; Right to Succeed for Norfolk; Born in Bradford for Bradford; and Citizens UK for Cardiff. As a result of this work, five hyperlocal areas have been identified where young people are more likely to witness or be involved in crime:
- Barkerend, an inner-city area of Bradford
- Grangetown and Butetown, just south of the city of Cardiff
- Cheetham Hill, north of Manchester city centre
- Lozells- Newtown, an inner-city area in West Birmingham
- Nelson, an area close to the town centre and seafront in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk
Through the next stages of the project, the YEF will work with their partners to better understand what the local community wants to see change. Then they will support residents in each local community to develop a long-term and sustainable action plan aimed at preventing children and young people becoming involved in crime. The plan will be informed by the best available evidence of what works, while empowering communities to find, design and deliver the programmes that they need. YEF will then invest up to £1 million in each area for up to five years, to make sure that the community’s plan is put into action.
Peter Babudu, Director of Impact at the Youth Endowment Fund, said: “The Youth Endowment Fund has a unique mission – to find out what works to prevent children and young people from becoming involved in violence and building a movement to put that knowledge into practice.
“Through our Neighbourhood Fund, we have an incredible opportunity to understand how empowering local people in small areas can make a difference. By giving communities control of how money is spent and supporting them to deliver the programmes they want to see, we can find out how community engagement and partnership approaches help to keep children safe from violence.
“We’re delighted to be working with our partners in each of these five areas, learning together as we go. Through these partnerships – and through future rounds of our Neighbourhood Fund – we look forward to investing in local communities to offer support children and young people in their areas.”
To find out more about the Youth Endowment Fund’s Neighbourhood Fund, please visit:
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Place-based grant round
Grant:Neighbourhood Fund
The Neighbourhood Fund will test different models and approaches to community engagement to better understand how, where and why it can keep children safe from involvement in violence.
