Youth Power Fund Impact Report
In 2021, the Blagrave Trust partnered with the Foyer Federation to offer local Foyers the opportunity to access pots of funding to support innovation and creativity around youth leadership and empowerment.
We wanted to champion new thinking, long-term change and youth-led approaches that challenge existing power structures and provide a catalyst for young people to lead in their local community and beyond.
In the supported housing sector, youth leadership and involvement, despite best intentions, is often underfunded and overlooked resulting in approaches becoming tokenistic, inconsistent and short term. By providing this funding, we aimed to create some space and time for services to innovate, try new approaches, and implement sustainable youth leadership systems.
The impact report
This report captures the impact shared by young people and staff members reflecting back on the first two years of the fund and sharing their hopes and ambitions for the final year and beyond.
Impact to date paints a compelling picture of what happens when Foyers receive long-term, flexible investment that allows them to experiment, take risks and be genuinely driven by the ideas and aspirations of young people.
Inspired by this impact, we are determined to learn from the effectiveness of this programme and embed new principles into our future work, influencing more Foyers to normalise youth leadership and put genuine power sharing at the heart of how their Foyers operate as places of power and purpose.