Foundations to spur youth services

Camden Council is to create a charitable foundation to co-ordinate voluntary sector youth services in the London borough.

Through the Camden Young People’s Foundation, the council will work with the voluntary and community sector to attract alternative sources of funding for youth services and boost partnerships between private, voluntary and statutory providers.

The move was agreed in April as part of plans to reshape young people’s provision in Camden in an effort to save £1.6m from the £6m youth services budget. It followed an eight-week consultation on initial proposals that would have seen much deeper cuts to services and funding, but the council retreated after receiving nearly 500 responses.

Georgia Gould, lead member for young people and economic growth at Camden Council, said the foundation will not replace the council-run youth service, which will still have a £3.4m budget by 2018 and retain its detached youth work team, Connexions service and five youth centres.

The foundation will not deliver services, but instead bring together organisations with a stake in youth services. It will be a membership organisation for anyone working with children and young people in the borough and have three main purposes – to fundraise, network and build capacity.

On raising funds, Gould says small charities that do quality youth work with a specific community may not have the expertise or resources to access larger pots of funding, something it hopes will be easier to do if they are part of a foundation.

She also says the council views the foundation as a way to build a network of organisations in the borough, all signed up to a shared purpose.

“We have so many arts and cultural institutions, and big businesses around the tech sector and sciences, all of which have a strong commitment to young people,” Gould says. “But it is hard sometimes to channel that into small individual organisations.

“We hope this charity brings together all of our work and will be able to mobilise the businesses in Camden to support the foundation.”

The council is currently looking at what the governance of the charitable foundation will look like and it has been getting help from the John Lyon’s Charity, which has already helped to establish three other young people foundations in Barnet, Brent and Harrow (see box).

Although the council is still finalising the details, Gould believes the foundation will have representation from the local authority, the voluntary sector, Camden Clinical Commissioning Group and the police, as well as the business community.

She adds that one of the requirements for the foundation is that it is accredited by London Youth, to ensure it operates to recognised standards. The foundation could also help other youth organisations cope with funding cuts and support them in making services more sustainable.

“Its success depends on how far people engage and how we are able to mobilise that energy, to fundraise and bring people together on this kind of shared vision,” she adds.

Voluntary sector organisations that deliver youth services in the borough will be consulted during May. Gould also plans to gain the support of local cultural institutions and businesses.

“We would like to have the charity established by September,” she says. “I believe eventually we will see it as potentially being a grant-giving programme for the voluntary sector, but at this stage we just want to set up the foundation and bring those organisations together.”

EXPERT VIEW: FOUNDATION CAN HELP GENERATE FUNDS BUT IS NOT THE TOTAL SOLUTION

Professor Patrick McGhee, assistant vice-chancellor, University of Bolton

Camden appears to be prepared to implement most of its original restructuring plan; it is just going to take longer to do it and use the extra time to explore other ways of keeping services open in the longer term.

This is a commendable approach, as it is rational to explore every avenue.

Camden is also to be commended on taking the views of services users seriously and trying to protect universal services.

Establishing a young people’s foundation – basically a new charity– is a useful approach to attract funding, raise awareness and explore new models of partnership in the context of a degree of independence from the council.

But it falls short of the “mutual” model advocated by the government.

Overall, this appears to be a sensible, measured approach by Camden in the context of an extremely difficult financial settlement from central government.

In the end, however, it is essentially a holding position and some difficult decisions still lie ahead.

*Professor McGhee is also a board adviser at management consultants MetaValue, which analysed some of the projects funded through the Delivering Differently for Young People programme

CHARITABLE FOUNDATIONS

The John Lyon’s Charity is working with London councils to establish young people foundations in response to the current pressures on services for young people

So far, three foundations have been set up in Barnet, Brent and Harrow

A further two in Camden and Westminster are due to be established soon

Four other foundations are also in the pipeline

Source: The John Lyon’s Charity