Our Strategy

The Youth Endowment Fund is a charity with a mission that matters. We exist to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence.

We know that to make a lasting difference we must do more than just fund and evaluate promising programmes. We need to establish consensus about what works and build a movement around making sure that young people get the very best support possible.

Here’s how we will make this happen.

We will fund good work

Priority themes
We will focus much of our funding on a series of priority themes, one or two at any one time.

Place-based
We will focus on specific areas where violent crime is high. We will build partnerships with local people and organisations through our Neighbourhood Fund to create and test approaches aimed at addressing local challenges.

Targeted projects
If we identify practices that don’t fit into our priority themes or place-based funding but are widely used, have potential or are untested, we will provide the resources to fund, evaluate and learn from them.

We will find what works

Evaluating good ideas
We will evaluate every programme and activity that we fund. The aim is to find out what works, for whom and why.

Making existing knowledge more accessible
We will summarise existing research about what works to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We’ll make it easy to find, easy to understand and easy to use.

Understanding the lives of young people
We will work to have a better understanding of the children, young people and families we are here to serve. We will examine the impact of discrimination and inequality, including racism and poverty, as well as the role of families and peer relationships.

We will work for change

Scaling up what works
When an activity is shown to be effective, we will look to expand it.

Spreading great practice
We will look to provide the best possible evidence on what does work and then work together to spread great practice.

Improving the system
We will work with others to change the structures, processes or institutional biases that decide how and where resources are directed and how children and their families are supported.

We will build partnerships and coalitions 

We are committed to building partnerships and coalitions with those who are passionate about protecting the children most at risk and want their decisions to be based on the best available evidence. Your knowledge, ideas and networks will shape our work and influence the decisions we make. Together we can make a difference.