Young grantmakers’ day
Author: Sophie, a Listening Fund adviser I’m one of the ten advisers to The Listening Fund. As part of our role over the past few years, we have designed two grant rounds of Phase Two from scratch, thinking carefully about things like criteria, scoring, and accessibility at all stages, and then chosen which organisations to […]
The Listening Fund’s partner jamboree
Author: Edd Fry, Listening Fund programme manager “Jamboree – a large celebration or party, typically a lavish and boisterous one“ OK, so I wouldn’t say we reached ‘boisterous’. And ‘lavish’ might be a stretch given that at one point we ran out of tea. But there was definitely a celebratory air in mid-April when we […]
Listening with Youth Ambassadors at KRAN
Author: Fawzia Worsley, Youth Engagement Coordinator for Kent Refugee Action Network The Listening Fund has helped KRAN to properly listen to our young people: even though we knew that we needed to understand young refugees better, we also felt that we probably knew better. Such is the way of adults. What we do at KRAN […]
Listening to staff with lived experience
Author: Mari Eggins, Chief Executive of Carefree Cornwall I work for Carefree, a Cornish charity that would not exist if, as founding CEO, I hadn’t listened to what young people told me. How Carefree began Carefree began in the early 2000’s, employing me as its first worker from January 2005. As a foster carer who […]
The benefits and challenges of involving young people in monitoring and evaluation
Author: Sarah Rose, Collective Discovery, learning partner of The Listening Fund Learning and evaluation can be powerful processes – informing judgements and decision making about impact, accountability and effectiveness. They are not value- or power-neutral processes: they are shaped by who decides what impact is, what stories get told, and what is deemed significant. Involving […]
How we developed co-production at Leap Confronting Conflict
Author: Alexandra McKell, Head of Innovation at Leap Confronting Conflict What we do At Leap Confronting Conflict, we work with young people and the adults that surround them such as parents / foster carers or practitioners, helping them build skills to effectively navigate conflict. Our training fosters healthy relationships, and encourages positive decisions and self-growth. […]
The Listening Fund’s partners – part three of three: grassroots work
Author: Edd Fry, The Listening Fund As explained in our last blog – which you can read here – 10 young people are working as advisers to The Listening Fund. They have designed two funding rounds and made the decisions on which applicants would get grants. The advisers’ first callout focused on youth leadership in […]
The Listening Fund’s partners – part two of three: the advisers focus on youth leadership
Author: Edd Fry, The Listening Fund In phase two of The Listening Fund we are contiuning to work with some of our phase one partners. You can read about them here. However, we also wanted young people to make decisions about what other listening work and initiatives we should fund. This was because we […]
The Listening Fund’s partners – part one of three: pioneers!
Author: Edd Fry, The Listening Fund In late 2017, The Blagrave Trust, Comic Relief, Esmée Fairbain Foundation and The National Lottery Community Fund invited 50 organisations to apply for two years of funding to improve how they listened to the young people with whom they worked. We were able to support 22 partners with grants. […]
What The Listening Fund learned in Scotland
Author: Beth Farmer, Creative Consultant and Facilitator, previously consultant to Listening Fund Scotland What is the Listening Fund Scotland? Between 2019 and 2021, the Listening Fund Scotland funded 11 partner organisations working with children and young people to deliver projects to deepen their listening practices and advocate for children’s voices in Scotland. This gave the […]