David Floyd talks to Dr Lynne Guyton, chief executive of John Lyon’s Charity, about the challenges facing local youth organisations

(Credit – Tony Webster, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

Running a local charity providing supporting children and young people means a constant battle to find much needed grant funding.

This situation became even more difficult than usual during the Covid-19 pandemic when many charities faced the combination of an increased demand for services and a lack of fundraising options.

John Lyon’s Charity (JLC) was one of the grant funders that stepped in to help at this critical point. The charity provides grants to benefit children and young people up to the age of 25 who live in nine boroughs in north and west London including Barnet – and has provided over £20million in funding to Barnet organisations since 1991.

For a brief period during the pandemic, many grant funders moved quickly to provide emergency funding but JLC chief executive Dr. Lynne Guyton tells Barnet Post: “I think what we could see was that that emergency response was not going to be enough.”

JLC was concerned that, following a brief period of lots of money being available, many charities were on course to run out of cash in a few years’ time.

Lynne went to the charity’s trustees and said “this is the rainy day” and got their support for a £22million programme over six years in addition to the charity’s regular funding programme.

She explains: “We thought the three main pillars in any child’s life are home, school and community: so we started to look at the funding required to make sure that local community charities were sustainable through a really difficult period of time.”

While the programme has successfully supported many charities since 2020, Lynne explains that “We couldn’t save everyone,” adding: “I think the funding market is even tougher now.”

She explains that after the pandemic in 2022/23: “We saw something like a 75% increase in applications to us. That was because of increased demand, just because charities needed money, but also because of what was happening in the funding sector.”

Lynne explains that some other grant funders “have paused their grant making, have closed their funds, and have chosen to reflect on what their strategy should be going forward, which I have to say I find absolutely exasperating.”

She adds: “We’ve managed to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Alongside this, while councils often provided much of the support for local organisations, this core funding has been “completely been swept away” over the past decade as “there’s no statutory responsibility for local authorities to provide youth services. So it’s been an easy area to cut.”

Lynne says this funding landscape has led JLC to fund charities in a different way. JLC has moved from giving an average grant of £30k per year for three years to an average of £50k-£70k per year for five years. Lynne says: “It’s quite a big difference to an organisation to feel that I’ve got time to breathe, and can actually get on and do stuff, instead of thinking, it’s that time where I need to start applying for grants again.”

One of the main ways JLC supports charities in Barnet is through Young Barnet Foundation, a membership organisation for local youth organisations which provides support and advice, and can put in consortium funding on behalf of smaller organisations.

Local organisations in the borough currently funded by JLC include: BritSom, based in Mill Hill, which supports over 500 refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants each year with services including a homework club and a youth programme; Barnet Community Projects, based on the Dollis Valley Estate, whose services include a foodbank, employability and youth work; and Terapia, who provide psychotherapy and counselling to support children’s mental wellbeing within six Barnet schools.

Lynne would advise Barnet residents thinking of setting up a community organisation – or seeking to support existing organisations in the borough – to get in touch with Young Barnet Foundation.

Despite the challenges, Lynne is hopeful for the future of children and young people’s charities: “One of the refreshing things is the resilience of the sector. People don’t give up and, when we go out and we see those groups in action and the work that they’re undertaking, the optimism of children and young people is still there.

“The children and young people are our next generation. We need to make sure that they don’t become cynical and disillusioned and that we can give them as much support as we can.”

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