Youth Investment Fund

Supporting voluntary, community and social enterprise youth organisations to deliver, expand and create high quality local youth provision in targeted communities across England

Area
England
Total available
£40 million
Application deadline

This programme is closed to new applications

Youth Investment Fund

Thank you for your interest in the Youth Investment Fund. This is a legacy page for an older Youth Investment Fund that ran from 2016 to 2021, which is no longer active.

A new Youth Investment Fund is now open, funded by the UK Government and delivered by Social Investment Business. Details of this fund can be found at: youthinvestmentfund.org.uk

The Youth Investment Fund (YIF) supports voluntary, community and social enterprise youth organisations to deliver, expand and create high-quality local youth provision in targeted communities across England. Successful applicants will be funded up until 2020 or 2021, which allows them to invest and plan for the future.

The YIF was launched in September 2016, and following two rounds of applications, 91 funding awards have been made in the six areas targeted by the programme:

  • Bristol and Somerset
  • East London
  • Eastern regions
  • Liverpool City region
  • Tees Valley and Sunderland
  • West Midlands.

See the list of awards

Youth Investment Fund Learning and Impact programme

The Youth Investment Fund aims to strengthen the evidence base on the impact of non-formal learning opportunities for young people. New Philanthropy Capital and The Centre for Youth Impact are leading a consortium of learning partners to develop and promote understanding about the impact of open-access youth work, for the benefit of any organisation which works with young people.

They are working in partnership with YIF grantees and young people to develop a new approach to impact measurement. The aim is to complement traditional outcome tracking with other types of data, on quality of provision, attendance and young people’s feedback. By focusing on these aspects, data collection can improve services and build relationships, as well as investigating impact.

This is a rare opportunity to get the learning and evaluation tools right for open access youth work. When we do, the learning project will deliver powerful evidence—with participating organisations expecting to work with half a million young people over the project lifetime.

More information can be found at https://yiflearning.org/.

Sustainability of youth organisations

Sustainability is a key element of the YIF, and groups have been offered support with their organisation capacity and resilience, alongside training and learning opportunities. A resource bank is being developed as part of this programme.

Dawn Austwick, Chief Executive of The National Lottery Community Fund, said: “This funding will help provide more opportunities for young people to build their confidence, discover new talents and reach their potential. It will be great to see young people getting involved in the design of these activities, making sure they reflect what matters to them and their lives.”

This programme is run by The National Lottery Community Fund and jointly funded by the Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).