This year’s theme celebrates the great leaders driving forward the great work of our charities’, whatever their role. ‘Outstanding leaders’ in the charitable sector are like a compass. They define an organisation’s vision and its direction of travel by providing the language to communicate this vision with beneficiaries and the wider public.
Being a leader takes boldness, determination and sometimes going out on a limb. In 1572, our founder, John Lyon, was granted a Royal Charter to set up a charitable corporation. The Charter also required him to endow a charitable trust that would maintain the Harrow and Edgware Roads. When “The Roads Trust” was relieved of its road-maintenance responsibilities in 1991, it became John Lyon’s Charity – the charitable foundation we all know today.
However, what is less well-known is that it was the tenacity and perseverance of Andrew Stebbings – the Charity’s first CEO – that led the Charity adapting to its modern form with a defined Beneficial Area and clear sphere of activity for grant-giving. The Charity owes a great deal to Andrew who sadly passed away in June. His death has led me to reflect on the foresight, wisdom and doggedness Andrew had, which took him nine years of negotiating with the Charity Commission and various Local Authorities to free The Roads Trust of its previous commitments and remit. As an exceptional and gifted lawyer, Andrew was well-placed to argue the benefits and need for a place-based children and young people’s charity.
By his own admission, he knew very little about the mechanisms of grant-giving and in the early days of the Charity, both he and the small team he assembled were learning on a day by day and year by year basis. But Andrew had a determination and a real shrewdness for understanding how to make the Charity work hard for its beneficiaries. Andrew had the courage to take his vision forward and build a dedicated team around him. Most importantly, Andrew really cared about the positive impact the Charity had. His achievements in this respect were vast, but he never spoke of them, always too self-deprecating or dismissive of platitudes. He was incredibly generous towards others, and I am personally grateful for his advice and support throughout my tenure. Quite simply, John Lyon’s Charity would not exist without the foresight and passion of Andrew Stebbings, and his legacy is firmly embedded in everything we do today.
Learning to Lead
Charities need leaders who can give strong direction in good times and bad. When you’re headed into the sunshine, everyone wants to follow. However, sometimes the sun isn’t shining – and charities have a lot of those moments. That’s why it’s important to invest in people, because when the rainy day arrives, good leadership is key. It’s why John Lyon’s Charity not only grants and gives advice to build capacity for organisations, but within organisations – to nurture and develop staff. Mentoring and developing those within our organisations who want to take the lead, at any level, is one of the most inspired choices we could make. When we grant, we see the relationship with our grantees as a partnership; we don’t simply hand over the money. This is because we want to be a part of the journey from start to finish as we value the charities we support.
Most people want to find meaning in their jobs – they want to feel that they are a part of something bigger and something better. They want to know that what they do matters. A good leader understands this need and connects the dots for people – the dots that help them see how the work they perform, no matter how small, has a bearing on the ultimate vision of the charity.
Many of our grantees such as Primary Shakespeare Company or icandance first started in a spare room of their flat, with nothing more than a desk and a chair, but with a strong vision of what they wanted to do. For these grantees, we really have been on a journey with them over many years to see out John Lyon’s original mission to give children and young people as many opportunities as possible. When no one else would fund them, we did. When no one else would advise them, we did. When other sources of funding dried up, our grants were for the long term.
Leading for the Future
If there is one thing I have learnt about leading in any industry and any context, it’s that standing still is not an option. How we undertook grant-making five years ago is different from how we grant today and inevitably it will be different in five years hence. Change and re-evaluating our work is vital to achieving maximum impact across the CYP sector. And the sector has never felt more vulnerable in terms of funding and sustainability. We have seen a 46% increase in applications to us in one year alone, and a 75% increase over five years. The launch of our new strategy on 1st April 2023 looks to tackle the increasing demand on our funding by streamlining and focussing our grant funds on education, increasing the number and value of grants over £40K and awarding grants for up to five years.
The impact of Covid and the cost-of-living crisis is still making itself felt amongst the communities we serve in North and West London. The 15% increase in our total grant-making last year to £15M reflects our increased commitment to charities though both our Home School Community (HSC) Strategy and through discretionary cost-of-living payments to grantees. HSC was launched specifically as a long-term response to the pandemic to strategically distribute funds over six years to strengthen the resilience of the CYP sector in our Beneficial Area. HSC has allowed the Charity to test out new ways of funding in response to the challenges of austerity and Covid. Crucially, this has been in addition to our ‘usual’ grant-making.
The Charity’s unique approach to grant-making is born out of over 30 years of working with fixed parameters; the nine boroughs of the Beneficial Area (BA), and the focus of working with young people. These two requirements make the Charity different from other national or more generalist funders and guides the Charity in its thinking. For a number of years now the Trust and Foundation world has been more widely discussing how to deliver funding in place while also delivering relational grant-making. These are two values that the Charity has consistently held as imperative to how it operates and the Charity has developed longstanding relationships with local communities, who in turn value the Charity as a key local stakeholder and an important part of the local funding ecology. Hence, our mantra of undertaking ‘grant-making by walking about’, boosted by the work of the Young People Foundations, has given the Charity a recognisable brand in the sector and in its Beneficial Area.
The Charity has always worked hand in hand with grantees. Whilst the Charity’s remit of place and CYP remains, it means organisations within the Charity’s Beneficial Area are better able to cope with the landscape of shifting priorities. In this we will continue, despite our tighter focus on education. We recognise that we cannot fund every CYP group in today’s economic climate. Hence, by viewing applicants with this more focussed educational lens we will concentrate on organisations that can be robust, resilient and sustainable for the sector in our Beneficial Area. We won’t push organisations to expand when it’s not appropriate. But where we see opportunity, will look to build capacity for an organisation and the sector as a whole.
We also recognise that we must be mindful of the funding ecology within our Beneficial Area, because over the past 30 years we have helped shape the funding of the sector significantly. We see clearly that groups which are closer to the people better serve them and that they are better at working with and understanding the challenges that their communities face.
The next two years will see further increases in our grant-making as we get into the ‘heavy lifting’ phase of our HSC Covid response; our HSC funds have increased from 15% of total grants given in 2021/22 to 22% last year. Our focus next year and beyond will be on ensuring that we target our funds to ensure that despite the challenges of the cost of living and the aftermath of Covid we can create meaningful and life changing opportunities for children and young people.