Member Spotlight: John Lyon's Charity

What are some of the key categories/areas you fund?  

John Lyon’s Charity gives grants to benefit children and young people up to the age of 25 (or up to 30 for young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities) who live in nine boroughs in North and West London: Barnet, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Hammersmith & Fulham, Harrow, Kensington & Chelsea, and the Cities of London and Westminster. Since 1991, we have been committed to transforming the lives of children and young people by creating opportunities to learn, grow, and develop through education. John Lyon’s Charity has distributed £232 million in grants to a range of organisations that seek to promote the life chances of children and young people through education, with around £15 million in grants distributed each year.  Grants are awarded to registered charities and maintained schools for projects such as youth clubs, arts activities , emotional wellbeing initiatives, sports programmes, supplementary schools and employability projects to name a few

What’s something exciting/innovative that you’re currently working on? 

Informed by our own experiences of providing inclusive internships, in June 2024 we announced £500,000 of ringfenced funding to provide year-long internships to young people with special educational needs and/or disabilities at Arts & Cultural Institutions. These are all paid at London Living Wage and are designed to give young people important work experience and avenues into meaningful employment whilst building the capacity and confidence of organisations’ to be a truly inclusive employer. Alongside the internship funding, we have awarded a grant to Pursuing Independent Paths to provide a dedicated Employment Support Coach who works with both the young people and the organisations at various points throughout the whole process – recruitment, employment and moving on.   

So far, we have awarded eight grants to a variety of Arts organisations including the Old Vic, Lyric Theatre Hammersmith and the V&A, and it has been really exciting to see how the young people and organisations are progressing! We’re holding workshops with both funded and interested organisations to share learning and experiences and our first cohort of interns are having their first meet up in January. We want to create a blueprint of best practice for increasing the number of inclusive work opportunities across the Arts sector and have got a good bank of evidence which we hope to share more widely next year.  

What’s one piece of learning/insight that you’d like to share with other London Funders’ members?  

One key learning we would share with other London funders is the power of simple, place-based models that are designed to be replicated, rather than bespoke initiatives that are difficult to scale or sustain.   

The Young People’s Foundations (YPFs) are a strong example of this. In December 2025, John Lyon’s Charity published a new report marking ten years of the pioneering Young People’s Foundations (YPFs) - a London-born model designed to protect and strengthen youth services at a time of rising demand and shrinking resources. 

YPFs are borough-based infrastructure organisations that bring together the voluntary, public and private sectors to collaborate around children and young people’s services at a local level. Since the first YPF launched in 2015, the model has become a vital force across London, unlocking funding, strengthening local youth sectors, and creating new partnerships between charities, local authorities, funders and statutory services. 

The model provides a clear, structured framework that other funders can adopt: invest locally, build strong cross-sector partnerships, and fund infrastructure as well as frontline delivery. A decade on, YPFs have shown that collaborative, borough-level investment can protect youth services and unlock additional funding, even in challenging financial climates. 

We have applied the same principles to other initiatives. This year marked the tenth anniversary of our School Holiday Activity Fund, which was created as a response to a widespread need: ensuring children and young people have access to safe, enriching activities during the school holidays. Over the past decade, the Fund has awarded more than £4 million in grants to over 1,000 community organisations, demonstrating how a clear, repeatable funding model can deliver long-term impact across multiple boroughs. 

Another example is our work on inclusion through the Perspectives series. In 2015, we identified a gap in applications supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. By listening to beneficiaries and examining our own grant-making practice, we uncovered a disconnect between the Arts sector and special schools. The resulting model, which has focused on connection, collaboration and shared learning has since informed a simple approach that we actively encourage other funders to replicate. 

What do you value most about being a part of London Funders?  

What we value most about being part of London Funders is the strength of its collective insight and opportunities for networking and sharing ideas.  Throughout our membership, London Funders has provided a trusted space for learning, collaboration and shared leadership, helping us to make better, more informed funding decisions.   

Its ability to mobilise funders quickly and effectively in response to emerging need is also particularly impressive, which was first evident following the Grenfell Tower disaster in 2016 where the Charity and London Funders established the Grenfell Children and Young People Funder coalition and then during the Covid-19 pandemic four years later.  London Funders’ proactive coordination and clear analysis of what was happening on the ground enabled funders to respond at pace. We were pleased to follow their lead and commit £1 million to the Emergency Covid Response Fund, playing our part in supporting London’s communities during an unprecedented crisis. 

Being part of London Funders allows us to act not just as an individual funder, but as part of a wider ecosystem - aligning resources, sharing risk, and responding collectively to challenges facing London’s voluntary and community sector. That shared approach is invaluable, both in times of crisis and in shaping longer-term, strategic responses across the city. 

Across all of this work, our key insight is that funders can achieve greater impact by designing initiatives that are intentionally straightforward, adaptable and shareable, and by being open about what they’ve learned. We believe that sharing models, evidence and expertise is just as important as funding itself. 

Looking ahead, share one thing that is on your radar. What should we prioritise as a network of funders?  

Looking ahead, one key priority on our radar is deepening collective investment in inclusive out-of-school opportunities for d/Deaf, disabled and neurodiverse young people - and doing so in a coordinated way that is co-created with the youth sector as well as with young people and their families. 

Through nearly ten years of our Perspectives work, we’ve seen that meaningful progress on inclusion is possible when different sectors come together to listen and learn from each other, leading to practical action. Our most recent phase, A New Perspective (2024), showed how targeted funding, sector convening and clear calls to action can shift confidence, practice and outcomes, particularly in the Arts and special school sectors. 

What’s becoming increasingly clear, however, is that inclusion cannot stop at the school gate. Initial findings from a survey with parents of children with additional needs has highlighted a significant gap in specialist and inclusive out-of-school provision, with many mainstream youth, play and community activities lacking the capacity or expertise to meet rising demand. As a result, too many young people with learning or access needs have limited/ no opportunities outside the school day, and families face real barriers in finding and trusting suitable provision. 

This has shaped our next phase, Broader Perspectives, which will explore how inclusion can be strengthened across youth clubs, sports groups and community-based settings. As a network of funders, we believe this is an area where shared prioritisation, aligned funding approaches and collective advocacy could make a significant difference. 

Our learning so far suggests that funders are well placed not only to resource inclusive provision, but to signal expectations, share evidence and support models that embed inclusion across all practice. Working together, we can help ensure that every young person has access to high-quality, enriching opportunities - both in and beyond the classroom. 

What’s an issue or area you’d like to discuss with other members? 

• Early Years – it is an area we would like to develop further and would be keen to know how other funders approach it.
• AI! We’re early in the exploration and would love to know what others are doing.  

Connect with us about:

• Placed-based and relational grant making
• creating collaborations
• funding schools
• supplementary education
• Youth Clubs
• special educational needs and disabilities
• cultural inclusion and emotional wellbeing
• youth infrastructure and anything CYP focused!  

The Member Spotlight is taken from our monthly member-exclusive newsletter, the Member Memo. The newsletter contains targeted information about upcoming events and updates from across the membership, with opportunities to connect and collaborate with other members. If you are a London Funders' member and would like to sign up, please email [email protected].