By Erik Mesel, Senior Grants & Public Policy Manager
Since its beginnings in 1578 as a road building and maintenance trust, John Lyon’s Charity has had a key focus on Infrastructure. However, since the Charity’s transformation into a Children and Youth funder in 1991, the infrastructure in question has not been roads, but voluntary sector infrastructure.
Supporting and building capacity in the Voluntary Sector has always been something of a Cinderella service. Getting funding for service delivery has always been easier and many funders have been focused on funding work that directly impacts on service users. This was also initially the focus of John Lyon’s Charity; our funding was targeted at charities that worked directly with children and young people rather than infrastructure, and in the 2000s local support structures were usually well funded by Local Authorities. This however changed after 2010, with the introduction of austerity, large parts of the voluntary sector had their funding cut and funding for Voluntary Sector infrastructure as well as more generally for open access children and youth funding was severely curtailed.
John Lyon’s Charity has always been a place-based funder and from the beginning we have prided ourselves on having a close ear to the ground. We think of our brand of Grant making as ‘Grant Management by walking about’, a riff on Peters and Waterman’s famous theory from In Search of Excellence. What became clear to us after 2010 is that we needed to do grant management differently to reflect the radically changed environment that our groups were working in. This initially manifested itself as being more flexible about what and who we funded. Not funding the replacement of Statutory Obligations is a mantra that made less sense when we realised large chunks of the public sector was not under statutory obligation. If we wanted to keep local youth clubs open, we had to fund it, otherwise there was a high chance these local cornerstone organisations would disappear.
However, this was not enough, the Children and Youth Sector (CYP) was under incredible strain, Youth Clubs were closing, and youth workers were leaving the sector. We realised that funding individual projects alone was not enough. There were clearly structural problems that needed addressing. The CYP sector was suffering from a multitude of problems that all converged on the sector at the same time. A move away from public sector grants in favour of Commissioning and Tendering would benefit larger charities and disadvantage small and medium sized groups. The rolling back of the state did not automatically lead to the Big Society flourishing. In addition to less and different funding, the traditional Local Authority Youth Services were being closed down and the structure that had supported voluntary sector groups was disappearing. Buildings that were housing these groups were being closed and turned into flats. A number of CYP groups who traditionally had got most of their funding from the Public Sector were suddenly having to fundraise from the Trust and Foundation sector without much previous experience of this. It was clear that Systems Change was required.
In 2013 / 14 the Charity spent a lot of time listening to the communities we serve as well as voluntary groups and Local Authorities. From these discussions it was clear that what was needed was a strong local organisation that could bring together the Public, Private and Voluntary Sectors. A truly cross-sectorial alliance of everyone who wanted to work with young people in a local borough area. A mass participation charity that could bring people together, define local need, build consortia, fundraise collectively and tackle these knotty subjects of funding, collaboration, venue space and young people’s participation collectively. Another key problem was short-termism, the sector was forever working around three- or four-year cycles of Government, Local Authorities or funders, knowledge was being lost in the constant search for innovation and ‘Quick Wins’. We knew we wanted a create a different type of membership organisation, an organisation that could work past funding and political cycles and create a strong local champion that was built to last for 100 years and not 10.
This led to the creation of the Young Brent Foundation in 2015. Young Brent is a membership body that brings together 311 local groups from faith groups to the Fire Service, youth clubs to local businesses. The Foundation would bring groups together to co-produce a local strategy for the CYP sector and fundraise for its members to deliver this vision.
What started off as trying to fix issues in Brent, rapidly expanded when local groups in Harrow and Barnet indicated that they also wanted a local organisation, a Young People’s Foundations (YPF) as we had started to call it. Soon there were YPFs in Brent, Harrow, Barnet, Camden, Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, Ealing, Kensington and Chelsea and outside of London in Manchester, Medway and Dorset. The 11 foundations have over 1,300 member organisations and have raised over £30 million in funding for their members since 2015.
With this massive growth in interest in the model, it became clear that this was something larger than the Charity’s Beneficial Area and that it needed an organisation that could support the growth of the models and support the YPFs themselves. All the YPFs are separate charities, but the Charity grants team had supported them from the beginning. In 2019, the Charity Grants Team established a new charity, the YPF Trust, a national organisation that could support YPFs and promote the model, as well as fundraise from national funders and work with Central Government who were increasingly interested in replicating the model. The YPF Trust set about creating a national structure for YPFs, building an online YPF-in-a-Box that would work as a step-by-step guide on how to establish new YPFs. The Trust also established a quality mark that would work as a way to secure fidelity to the model.
So, what next for the YPFs?
In September 2022, the YPF Trust signed a contract with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support the Youth Investment Fund by establishing ten new YPFs in Levelling Up Areas around the country, bringing the model to cities and towns in the North, Midlands, East and South of the country. The CYP sector will always benefit from collaboration, joint working and focusing on the grassroots. The YPF Model helps facilitate this and the Charity is keen to support this now and as the movement grows in the future.