By Cathryn Pender, Anna Hoddinott and Erik Mesel, John Lyon’s Charity
The Charity’s new Strategy (launched 1 April 2023) has set out a more clearly articulated and more concise explanation of the work of the Charity and its role within John Lyon’s Foundation. It also sets out how it will continue to strive to be fit for purpose now and over the next five years and brings John Lyon’s own vision for Education back to the front and centre of the Charity’s work.
Cathryn Pender, Anna Hoddinott and Erik Mesel have a combined length of service at John Lyon’s Charity of over sixty years. Using their combined experience, they discuss the characteristics that make John Lyon’s Charity unique, the complexities of its Beneficial Area as well as its links to the wider John Lyon’s Foundation, and how the Charity has looked to its past to direct its future.
John Lyon’s Foundation
John Lyon’s Charity is part of John Lyon’s Foundation, which is made up of the Charity and two leading independent schools, Harrow School and The John Lyon School. Whilst it is not unique for independent schools to have a philanthropic arm, it is highly unusual that something should exist on the scale of John Lyon’s Charity that is still so closely linked to its wider Foundation but operates separately and independently. Whilst both schools have their own philanthropic focus and, in the case of Harrow, has the Harrow School Development Trust that utilises the fundraising pull of those within the Harrow School community, these are much more aligned to traditional models of public school charitable activities. With John Lyon’s Charity, the Foundation has something else; something special; and something to which it can truly claim to have benefited the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and young people that live in North and West London. All three entities of the Foundation are each intrinsic stakeholders and contribute in important ways to the ecosystem in the Charity’s Beneficial Area.
John Lyon’s Charity Today
In John Lyon’s Charity, John Lyon’s Foundation has a very important asset. The Charity’s worth to the voluntary sector and to the children and young people of North and West London cannot be underestimated and the value of what the Charity can continue to bring to the future landscape of the world in which those children and young people are navigating now is significant.
The Charity has spent over 30 years honing its craft and if there was ever a time to plunder that expertise, this is most certainly it. In a world where we have all got used to the short termism that encapsulates our lives, John Lyon’s Charity has stood firm and not deviated from its belief in the work that it has been doing. It has never strayed from what is needed, no matter how hard and, most importantly, no matter how ‘unpopular’, or considered unimportant by others. For the Charity’s Beneficial Area, this strategy has proved to be right. The Charity has achieved this by listening to the communities that it serves and embracing what those communities need – not what we ourselves consider they need. By focusing on preventative solutions and creating opportunities for children and young people, the Charity can point to many, many successes over the years and be confident in its approach.
Making the Most of Place
The Charity is restricted to making grants in eight North and West London Boroughs and the City of London. The Beneficial Area covered by John Lyon’s Charity combines about a quarter of London, representing c.2.3million people. This creates a sub-regional area, the size of which is not replicated by any other funding organisation in the country. The size of the Beneficial Area gives us scalability, and the ability to make connections across an area that is both relatively small but large enough for us to make an impact. Combined with size, the scale of grant-making we can make in this area sets us apart. Grants for children and young people’s organisations, that are significantly larger than what local authorities spend on youth services in each of the Charity’s boroughs, have given the Charity a reputation and voice across all our boroughs.
With good public transport links, it is easy to travel around in the Beneficial Area. This, combined with the density of population, has helped create the Charity’s signature policy of ‘grant-making by walking about’, a riff on Peters and Waterman’s famous theory from In Search of Excellence. This thinking is not simply about visiting projects and seeing the work first hand (although all projects are visited on a regular basis) it is also that the Grants Team have an excellent understanding of the boroughs, the communities and our projects within them. Good grant-making is about making local connections and understanding how the various voluntary and community sector organisations work together to fit into a local ecosystem and, vitally, how they interplay with Local Authorities and other funders. The Charity has spent 30 years developing a bird’s eye perspective of its Beneficial Area and how the various stakeholders interrelate. Latterly, this has been helped, in part, because many of the significant local stakeholders have been funded long-term by the Charity or are actual creations of the Charity itself, such as the Young People’s Foundations (YPFs) or our initiative for Children Looked After that works in partnership with the Virtual Schools in the Charity’s boroughs.
The Charity has regularly taken risks (a responsibility of grant givers the world over) and held its course, ignoring trends and striving to achieve its ambitions. This has not always been easy, but taking these strategic decisions has proved successful for the children and young people of the Charity’s Beneficial Area and it is gratifying that others are looking to see what the Charity has done.
Of course, any good place-based funder is driven by the demographics of its area and the Charity’s Beneficial Area is not only one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse places in the world, but, along with places like Queens in New York City and Toronto, displays a form of ‘hyper-diversity’. These are areas in which there is no dominant local ethnic group. All the eight boroughs are ‘minority majority’ and have large and established groups of people with descent from all over the world. The Beneficial Area has the UK’s largest communities of Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Farsi as well as large Christian and Muslim communities. The Beneficial Area is in many ways the arrival lounge of the country, close to Heathrow and Central London, and the area has for centuries been one of the first places that communities arrive in. From the Welsh in Ealing, the Irish in Kilburn, the Caribbeans in Notting Hill, Indians in Southall and more recently Somalis in Brent, many of London’s communities got their first foothold in the Beneficial Area. What is more, the Beneficial Area is a fantastic example of positive integration. Whilst it has poverty, the area does not have ghettos, it does not have Banlieues like Paris; the Beneficial Area is the London of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, with some of the largest and most successful mixed communities anywhere in the world.
An area like this has required the Charity to engage in a positive way with the communities we serve and is why the Charity has a well-deserved reputation for funding and building capacity in minority-led community organisations. No other foundation funds more supplementary schools, and the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education (NRCSE) has long been a key partner of the Charity. Often coined ‘harder to reach’, JLC has nevertheless found successful ways to work with these communities for over 30 years.
The Charity has a long history of innovation and incubating new approaches in the Beneficial Area and this has been made possible by our close links to groups who are willing to allow us to innovate, as well as our recognition of good quality initiatives that we are willing to test out in the Beneficial Area because they could add real value to the lives of children and young people. Focus on place and age enables us to go deeper rather than broader, it forces the Charity to understand the area better and to find new and innovative solutions to deep seated and complex problems. And, vitally, solutions that can be shared.
A Foundation for Children and Young People
The Charity is one of the largest funders in the UK that only focuses on children and young people. With the advent of austerity after 2010, the nature of Trust and Foundation funding changed significantly, and funders started to focus on fewer thematic areas in order to have a greater impact. Sadly, not many funders focused on children and young people and for many it remained an assumption that this was still a priority and an obligation of the State. The Charity could see, however, that this was not the case: Youth clubs and play schemes were shuttered as local authorities closed Youth Services, and in large areas of the country the entire infrastructure of children and youth services was demolished. The Charity swung to meet this increased need, increasing funding for youth clubs and establishing YPFs to create local infrastructure resource. As a result, the Beneficial Area has one of the most developed children and youth sectors in the country. Not only did the Charity’s own funding have an important impact on this, but it has also been working closely with local authorities and other funders to increase their investment in youth services.
As an educational foundation, John Lyon’s Charity views it as a necessity to fund schools directly, something that very few Trusts and Foundations do. Schools are one of the most fruitful places to fund preventative projects that can reach young people en masse. JLC has for three decades pioneered a variety of ways of engaging with schools and continues to innovate, establishing the Schools in Partnership Fund to encourage greater partnership working between schools, the Excluded Initiative with the Evening Standard, Emotional Wellbeing programmes that have had a significant impact on the ethos of participating schools and the Parent Ambassadors programmes that works with newly arrived communities – significant given the demographics of the Beneficial Area.
Collaborate, collaborate, collaborate
This key focus for the Charity’s came into its own when the Charity led the Grenfell funder collaboration of Children and Young People funders after the Grenfell fire in 2017. Building on the Charity’s specific knowledge of RBKC, together with our experience of being a Place-Based funder and ‘grant-making by walking about’, the Charity quickly pulled together a partnership of Trusts and Foundations, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the local voluntary sector, the Department for Education and London Funders. This partnership created a Grants Portal, designed the first ever grants single application form and gave out the first grant to an organisation within two weeks of the Fire. In addition to swiftly distributing millions to local children and young people projects, this process provided the blueprint for future funder collaborations, such as the London Community Response during Covid, where the Charity led the Children and Young People element of the collaboration, and Propel, which is now the largest non-emergency funder collaboration in the UK, aiming to distribute £100 million in London over the next 10 years.
The Charity’s other key collaboration is the creation of Young People Foundations (YPFs). Established in 2014 in Brent, there are now soon to be 25 YPFs around the country, where 1000s of community organisations work together with public sector organisations, local businesses, faith organisations, schools and funders. The YPFs build local capacity, create networks and have raised over £30 million in funding for their members since 2015. The Charity also established the national charity, YPF Trust, which supports the growth of the YPF movement across the country and which now receives funding from the DCMS.
Looking to the Future
The new Strategy has provided an opportunity to re-examine our approach to grant-making whilst, crucially, not proving detrimental to the Charity’s honed processes or archive of impressive stories. How this will continue to work in practice over the longer term will of course play out, but for the moment the Charity is in a good place to concentrate on what is most important – the application of good and effective grant giving for the children and young people of the Beneficial Area and preserving the success, care and reputation of the Charity that has benefitted the hundreds of thousands of children and young people in the Beneficial Area over the last 31 years.