Youth organisations urged to build reciprocal links with businesses

Eliciting funding and support from corporate partners is common practice for many children’s charities.

But while the concept might be thriving in some parts of the sector, a review of how youth services engage with businesses, published by the government-funded United Futures programme last month, revealed a relatively barren landscape.

A brokerage service to connect youth services with businesses to garner new investment is to be piloted as part of the United Futures project. Meanwhile, organisations are being urged to learn from examples of best practice highlighted in the review.

Jeremy Glover, chief executive of Onside North West, says it is vital to be able to offer some form of benefit to a corporate partner.

“You have to get away from the idea that the role of business in youth work is philanthropy – it’s not,” he says. “You are not going there with a begging bowl, you are going for a conversation and the first question is ‘how can our youth project help your company?’”

Once an initial relationship has been created, care must be taken to maintain the relationship, Glover says. “You have to communicate with them, be respectful of them and understand what they want out of the relationship and deliver that.”

In Kensington and Chelsea, the youth service is in the process of becoming a staff-led mutual. Brendan O’Keefe, head of local services to young people, says that until now, links with businesses had been seen as a “sideline”.

But he admits that investment from the private sector will be essential when the service becomes a mutual, since its survival will rely on income.

“There is no question that as a mutual, we will need dedicated staff whose job it is to bring in the income – bid writing, scanning the market, seizing opportunities and developing the models we need to attract inward investment and corporate sponsorship,” he says.

Business development
This work will be done by a business development unit of three staff. “We are preparing branding materials at the moment and the advice we have been given is to have different branding for children, for parents, for commissioners and for corporate sponsorship. We have to learn from how the private sector does it,” O’Keefe explains.

Best practice examples cited in the United Futures report include the Boxing Academy in Tottenham, London, which provides alternative education for 13- to 16-year-olds at risk of educational exclusion. It is receiving support from Sainsbury’s through a £100,000 fund created by the supermarket chain to support local community groups in areas affected by last summer’s riots.

As a result of the partnership, Sainsbury’s has provided £8,000 in lunch vouchers for young people, while the supermarket’s store manager in Tottenham is supporting the head of the academy to write a business plan to guarantee the future sustainability of its work.

In Sheffield, construction company the Kier Group is working with the council and housing association Sheffield Homes as part of the National Care Advisory Service’s Care2Work initiative, providing employment opportunities for young care leavers.

The scheme identifies young people to take up apprenticeships within the company and supports them to sustain employment.

Teresa Jolley, head of corporate responsibility at Kier, says: “We have 11,000 employees overall and they all know they work for a company that takes this kind of thing very seriously and does its best to help young people who are disadvantaged. It does an awful lot for staff morale and how our employees regard the business.”