Current programmes
Regional funding
We provide unrestricted, long term funding and look for a close mission match with our partners. We do not fund national or London based organisations to deliver services in these areas.
Our priorities are that:
- Funding will benefit young people young people who are the most disadvantaged as a result of poverty, social exclusion, discrimination or any other contributing factors, especially those from the poorest areas
- There is clear evidence of impact for young people
- Organisations take an intersectional approach
- Young people are demonstrably in support of, or driving, the work
We have two funding routes:
Smaller grants for organisations working in the frontline providing vital support for the young people we seek to serve. We offer unrestricted funding for three years. We make decisions on these grants monthly.
Strategic partnerships with youth organisations where there is close alignment with our mission, they create outstanding impact for young people, they are creating systemic change, and there is existing sector influence. These grants are larger. We make decisions on these grants four times a year, in April, June, September and November. Both offer unrestricted funding for three years.
Exclusions: For our regional funding, we only fund charities or registered CIC’s and do not fund unconstituted groups or individuals. We fund work with young people in England only. We do not fund the promotion of religion or major capital appeals. We prioritise the areas we seek to benefit: Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex and Wiltshire.
Our regional funding is available on an ongoing basis and you can apply here.
Here is a flavour of some of the work we fund…
Readipop
Readipop works with young people to unlock their creativity and self-expression through music making and performance, offering mentoring and inspiration to hundreds of young people each year in Reading. Check them out
Team Domenica
Team Domenica is a unique social enterprise charity offering young people with learning disabilities in Brighton the chance to develop their employability through real time work. Check them out
Regional Advisers' Fund
The Listening Fund
All resources and further information can be found on The Listening Fund website.
Previous programmes
Restart Youth
The Restart Youth fund has now come to an end.
Please click here to be notified about future regional funding programmes.
Current programmes
Challenge and Change Fund
History illuminates the capacity and courage of young people to drive change, but for too long their ideas have been restricted or constrained. Power is often held by adult-led initiatives that end up speaking on their behalf or controlling or leading their ideas. This fund exists to change that and move power and resources to young people.
In 2020 amazing young minds and hearts made the vision for this fund possible, and its future will be guided by their knowledge, wisdom, and insights.
The original pilot fund was co-created by three Challenge and Change Advisers, Blagrave, and the Centre for Knowledge Equity. With funding from the Ellis Campbell Charitable Foundation and ZING. To learn more about the pilot, our key lessons, and a deeper dive into the design and delivery of the Fund, please read our report: Building a Youth-Led Fund: Learning and insights from the Challenge and Change Fund and/or watch our learning event.
In 2022, the fund has been designed by seven incredible advisers: two from the initial team and a further five who were partners in the first round of the Challenge and Change fund. Together with Blagrave staff, they have shared insights from their own experiences to further develop the design of the programme and have made the decision to award a further 26 grants of up to £10,000 to individuals, collectives and movements tackling a wide range of social issues to challenge social injustice. We are committed to running and growing this fund for the next three years – so watch this space!
Applications for Challenge and Change are currently closed.
Please click here to be notified about potential funding opportunities in the future.
Pathways Fund
The Pathways Fund was launched as a pilot in 2022 in response to feedback from young changemakers that there was a lack of longer-term funding available for youth led groups past seed funding as their work starts to scale, gain momentum, and formalise. Pathways gives £10-30K of funding per annum for up to three years to youth-led groups who are at a key point in their journey when they are ready to scale their impact and grow. For the pilot year, we funded 4 groups that were part of the original Challenge and Change cohort:
- Avocados Advocacy – set up by a care experienced young woman in Devon for children in care and care leavers. Among other things, they provide a legal advocacy service in partnership with University Law Clinics so young people can access information about their rights and entitlements and enable links to local authority care systems.
- Our Streets Now – is a youth-led, grassroots and intersectional campaign to create a world in which everyone can feel safe and be safe in public space. Their aim is to end public sexual harassment (PSH), the set of sexually intimidating behaviours that women, girls and marginalised groups regularly face in public space.
- Radical Body – a disability arts organisation producing radical new performances by and for disabled people, with a particular focus on improving access to careers in the arts for people who have difficulty leaving their homes.
- Young Justice Advisors – are a group of young people with lived experience of the Criminal Justice System, creating a platform for other young adults in and with experience of, the justice system and working with a range of agencies to influence policy and practice.
These four groups have joined the Young Trustees Movement to create a cohort of five partners that are youth-led and at a key point of transition, growth, and formalisation. During this year we are learning from the pilot and hope to further shape the future of the Pathways Fund in response to the needs of our current grant partners. In the latter half of 2023 we aim to continue to grow the programme and will explore opening it up to new groups.
Applications for Pathways Fund will open in the latter half of 2023.
Please click here to be notified about potential funding opportunities in the future.
Partner Development Fund
The Partner Development Fund is a new fund that we are piloting this year for our pre-existing youth-led grant partners! We have designed the fund in direct response to feedback and learning from our youth-led partners. They expressed the need for quick-release micro-funding to support unexpected needs as they emerge. In response, we have designed a brand new funding mechanism to allow us to get grant payments out in 2-3 weeks that meets this need. Costs could include developmental opportunities, collaboration and travel costs, or funding to support wellbeing and rest.
Applications for Partner Development Fund are available on an ongoing basis and you can apply here!
Previous programmes
The Opportunity Fund
The Opportunity Fund sought to support young people (18-25) who were passionately campaigning for social change or had ideas for a social purpose enterprise, but did not have the resource or capacity to fully explore their potential – they couldn’t live rent free, take a gap year or rely on connections.
But it took more than money – it needed time, connections, permission, and encouragement as well.
The Fund provided the equivalent of a part-time basic income and additional support for 25 aspiring social entrepreneurs, campaigners and activists (although, they wouldn’t necessarily use these labels) – to nurture and explore their passion, ideas and expertise whilst recognising their need to earn a living. It focused on young people with experiences of structural and systemic injustice and inequality – those most often furthest from the capital and resources needed for them to drive social change.
We hope our learning will support other funders to step into directly funding young people – to recognise the value in this approach and to embrace the opportunity.
We learnt that as well as money, these young people needed:
- Time
18 months felt short for some young people, although it is still longer than most programmes - Connections
Funders need to open up their networks to young people - Permission
We all feel the need to succeed or win – young people needed reassurance that this was a genuine opportunity to explore and develop, with no pressure or expectation to deliver anything more - Encouragement
After all, everyone benefits from reassurance and praise, especially when for some this was their first experience of leadership
We learnt that working alongside trusted partners to support young people was critical – and resourcing those partners appropriately was essential.
We learnt that no matter what the outcome of the campaign or business, the experience for each young person of having someone believe in you, and providing funding and support for a sustained period led to 100% increasing their aspirations for their life and work. Young people improved their quality of life, gained employability skills and 82% felt more able to influence and impact on others. The Opportunity Fund recognised that the personal journey has more value than simply the end destination for each young person.
The offer needed to be carefully made, to young people who were ready – in terms of their skills, wellbeing, clarity of goals, and experience. The majority of young people achieved social impact on injustices they directly experienced in their lives, including homelessness, exclusion, mental health and wellbeing. Whilst powerful it must be acknowledged that this work takes its toll – purpose work is often deeply rooted in people’s lived experience and pursuing it requires appropriate support and self-care. We needed to find the right balance to give young people greater autonomy over their decisions and actions, to share power whilst providing appropriate support and guidance.
We learnt that whilst there are parallels, supporting entrepreneurs is distinct in many ways to supporting campaigners.
Ensuring young people have the time, financial resource and quality support to grow from feels like a reasonable ask of funders. In our experience this allowed young people to step into their passions, dreams and lives, to experiment and to explore, to learn and to develop as individuals with a social purpose.
There’s much more in the report – or contact info@phf.org.uk or grants@blagravetrust.org with any questions or for further information.
Please click here to be notified about potential funding opportunities in the future.
Current programmes
Youth Organising Movement Builders
We have partnered with NEON to deliver a Youth Organising Movement Builders programme this July. Movement Builders is a four-day residential training programme with between 25 – 30 participants.
Key Details
- Details: Movement Builders, Youth Organising Special
- Dates: Friday 28th July to Monday 31st July 2023
- Location: Leicester
The programme will take participants through a range of models and theories which they’ll explore as a whole group and in smaller groups through interactive activities, workshops and discussions. To support organisations and youth organisers to access the training, we will be offering grants of £1000 per attendee recognising that especially for unpaid organisers or groups with little to no income, attending a 4 day residential training is a big commitment. These grants could cover your transport, childcare, time away from delivery etc.
The programme will be youth centred, and NEON welcome applications from people holding a range of different roles and spaces across the youth organising movement. Whilst they will priortise young leaders between 18-30 years old, they recognise that there are many movement leaders, co-conspirators, and elders that are key to the movement and see the residential being an intergenerational space. The programme is open to organisers, leaders, campaigners, service providers, youth workers, educators, policy makers who are 18+ and active either within the youth organising movement or at the intersection of youth organising and other issues.
Applications for places on the residential closed Mon 22nd May.
We will be sharing learning with the wider field following the event.
Collaborating with other funders
Blagrave Trust, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Esmée Fairbairn Foundation have a shared interest in supporting youth organising and in building the field of practice in the UK. We are communicating closely as we develop initiatives and investment and aim to combine work if that feels in the best interests of the overall aims. Above all we aim to collaborate in order to avoid duplication, to increase investment and support for youth organising and to be guided by young people, practitioners and leaders in this field.
More details to follow in the coming months.
Watch this space!
Funding youth organising
We are continuing to scale our funding to young lived experience leaders and youth-led groups through the Challenge and Change Fund and Pathways Fund. We acknowledge that this is still a much under-funded part of the youth organising ecology.
Funding anchor organisations
We fund a number of anchor organisation through our wider funding programmes that are seen as ‘key actors’ who are driving practice and advocating on behalf of the field of youth organising including: The Advocacy Academy, We Belong, MAP, POMOC, 4Front, and RECLAIM.
Please click here to be notified about potential funding opportunities in the future.
Current programmes
Funding young people in policy-making
In spring 2022, we agreed nine new partnerships with organisations leading the way in supporting young people to be a part of the policy making process on issues that have affected their lives.
These organisations are:
- 4Front (campaigning locally, regionally and nationally; local work delivered in Barnet):a member-led youth organisation that supports young people who have experienced trauma, violence and racial injusticeto create change in their own lives, whilst their voices are uplifted to create change in the system in order to achieve transformative precedents for all young people.
- Become (London based, campaigning nationally): one of two projects aiming to influence the implementation of the Care Review findings; working with young people to drive and inform Become’s own advocacy work.
- Challenging Behaviour Foundation (Kent based, campaigning nationally): CBF’s objective is that national and institutional policy on the restraint and accommodation of severely disabled young people in in-patient units be directly informed by those young people’s experiences and views, using a range of innovative communication and interpretation methodologies.
- Leicestershire Cares, partnered with Learning and Work Institute (Leicester-based, campaigning regionally and nationally): one of two projects aiming to influence the implementation of the Care Review findings. Supporting young care experienced researchers to develop and pursue policy asks, starting with access to Universal Credit.
- MAP (Norwich-based, campaigning regionally and nationally): supporting the Young Activist Network to mobilise, work alongside local authorities and participate in national campaigns on youth homelessness, cost of living and poverty solutions ‘post’-Covid.
- Polish Migrants Organise for Change (working alongside local authorities in Liverpool, Cambridgeshire and Birmingham) network of young first-generation migrants (with a focus on Central and Eastern Europeans) campaigning for policy and systemic change around how migrant communities are understood, legislated for, supported and represented. Supporting groups of young people with lived experience of immigration to work alongside local authorities to understand and implement national policy in ways that best serves local communities.”
- Reclaim (Manchester-based, working in Bolton and Leigh): Working-class, youth-led campaigns on: improving high streets/local economies; levelling up; net zero commitments; and links between the three. Targeting election manifestoes in these previous ‘red wall’, now swing seats.
- Warren: Large service delivery charity with history of campaigning and policy influencing. Grant to support posts to working with groups of young people on the specific issues they and their peers have identified as priorities, including diversifying school governance and the development of a suicide prevention policy by Highways England.
- We Belong (campaigning nationally; local work delivered in London and Manchester): also led by young people with lived experience of immigration to the UK, in this case a cohort who arrived from commonwealth countries as children. Working to implement a reduction in the pathway to citizenship from 10 to 5 years as achieved as a policy change in 2021, through a hyperlocal community organising model.
These organisations will be working with each other, with ourselves and with a learning partner, Common Vision, to strengthen their work and share knowledge across the youth sector and policy-making spheres about how to most effectively and impactfully work with young people as part of the policy making process. We will be linking to Common Vision’s findings and learning resources from this page throughout 2022 and 2023.
Please click here to be notified about future policy funding programmes.
Funding youth policy and advocacy
We continue to work with and learn from our existing partnerships with policy and advocacy organisations, however, we do not have funding available for new partnerships at present.
Applications are currently closed for our policy funding.
Please click here to be notified about future policy funding programmes.
Here is a flavour of some of the work we fund…
Children England
Children England works with over 20 young people on a long-term basis to reimagine the welfare state with children at the heart and campaigning to make that a reality. Check them out
Just for Kids Law
Just for Kids Law supports children and young people with a unique holistic casework model that helps them to overcome the problems they face and use evidence from their practice to campaign for wider reform. Check them out
UK Democracy Fund
See the UK Democracy Fund website for more details and how to apply.
