What are its origins?
As with many grant-giving trusts, John Lyon's Charity has a very old and distinguished history. While it has only been distributing grants since 1991, the charity and its endowment is still constituted on the basis of a 16th century Royal Charter.
John Lyon was a yeoman farmer from the village of Preston in Harrow. In 1572 he was granted a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I to found a free grammar school for boys: Harrow School.
The charter also anticipated that John Lyon would endow a trust for maintaining two roads between London and Harrow, now known as the Edgware Road and Harrow Road, and in 1578 John Lyon provided an endowment in the form of a farm of some 48 acres in the area now known as Maida Vale for this purpose.
The modern charity still retains the freehold to the original farm in Maida Vale. While the charity no longer maintains the roads, grants are made to organisations working in the boroughs that contain an element of either of the two roads and which makes up the clearly defined beneficial area of the nine northwest London boroughs.
What does it fund?
The charity's mission is to promote the life chances of children and young people through education. Grants are made to organisations providing a wide range of opportunities supporting children and young people through a variety of initiatives. The charity is a place-based funder, and since 1991 has distributed more than £100m to a range of services investing in children and young people, including youth clubs, arts projects, supplementary schools, emotional wellbeing initiatives, childcare and parental support schemes and sports programmes.
Grants are awarded to registered charities, state schools and organisations with automatic charitable status.
What are Young People's Foundations?
The charity's flagship initiative is Young People's Foundations. These currently exist in seven of the nine boroughs and consist of a model devised by the charity in response to the pressures on the children and young people's sector. It has also been adopted in other areas of England.
Each individual Young People's Foundation seeks to ensure that the organisations and groups that serve children and young people at a local level are strong, sustainable and fit for purpose.
The Young People's Foundations are borough-based, membership organisations, open to any group that works with children and young people. Their primary purpose is to support and build capacity in the sector and to work strategically to bring different groups together to develop partnership projects and share resources and good practice.
They operate across five main strands of work by:
- Acting as prime contractors at a local level, building consortia among the membership and applying for grants or contract incomes.
- Running local network groups, including helping issue- and locality-based groups to share expertise and the delivery of capacity building support.
- Managing a small grants scheme - these local funding pots are aimed at smaller organisations that may not be able to engage in the larger consortia bidding.
- Acting as a single point of contact to attract other philanthropic support for the member organisations. The creation of this "brand" and "single access point" is helpful for potential funders, particularly corporates, wanting to provide financial and in-kind support to youth organisations in the borough.
- Creating and maintaining an online "venue bank", which enables members to share space and match needs for venue space with spare capacity.
How to apply?
John Lyon's Charity operate a simple two-stage application process, which commences with a proposal letter. Applications are considered year-round.
More from: www.jlc.london
Funding roundup
- Catch22 has been awarded £448,000 of National Lottery funding to incubate 10 start-up social enterprises over the next two years. The grant will give individuals and their teams the chance to work across Catch22's London and Liverpool offices to develop ideas and shake up public services.
- As part of the five-year Enterprise Development Programme run by Access - The Foundation for Social Investment, a fund worth £1.85m will help charities and social enterprises operating in youth services or tackling homelessness to "develop or grow their enterprise activity and income". Charities will be able to apply for feasibility grants of between £5,000 and £10,000. UK Youth and the Centre for Youth Impact have been appointed as "sector partners" to support organisations with applications.
- A further £5m has been set aside for uniformed youth groups to expand into deprived areas. The money, from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, will be managed and distributed by the Youth United Foundation, to support expansion of police cadets, Scouts, Guides and faith-based organisations.
- The Home Office is to invest an additional £23.6m into cracking down on online child abuse and understanding offender behaviour. Over the next 18 months, £21m will bolster the response of law enforcement agencies to online grooming and videos and images of abuse. Meanwhile, a further £2.6m will be provided to child protection organisations to improve understanding of offender behaviour and prevent future offending.
