Youth Endowment Fund

The Youth Endowment Fund exists to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put this knowledge into practice.

We know that positive activities can help children and young people improve their physical and mental health, develop positive behaviours and build self-esteem. But what we don't really know – due to a lack of high-quality research and impact evaluations – is the impact these activities have on reducing youth offending and violence. We aim to identify 5 or 6 projects to fund and evaluate. We're planning to spend between £9 million and £10 million depending on how well applications meet our criteria.

Scope of programmes we'll fund in this round

For this round, we define positive activities as either:

• the arts (including music making, arts and craft, dancing, drama, creative writing and poetry, photography, painting, pottery, sculpture or new media/digital arts)
• sports
• wilderness activities
• adventure activities

Who we're looking to support

We're looking to fund and evaluate projects that target, support and work with children and young people who are:

• Primarily aged 10 to 18 years old.

And have one or more of the following key characteristics:

1. They are already involved in the youth justice system, either in custodial or community-based settings.
2. They are considered at risk of involvement in youth offending, due to a variety of factors, including:

• individual, familial or geographical reasons (often referred to as youth violence 'hotspots'), or
• being affiliated with groups involved in crime, violence and trafficking (often referred to as 'gangs'), or
• being excluded from school, or
• being affected by serious violence, criminal or sexual exploitation (as perpetrators and/or victims).