Evaluation of Care Leavers Proactive Funding Programme (2018-2023).

Beginning in 2018, we partnered with organisations working towards ensuring positive outcomes for young care leavers and awarded multi-year grants to the Drive Forward Foundation, Catch22, Lighthouse and Become. 

Our goal was to fund organisations and projects that would have a meaningful impact. Some projects delivered this through improving the support and opportunities provided to young people who were leaving or had recently left care. Others provided earlier intervention for young people still within the care system, with the aim of contributing to better outcomes in the future. 

Whilst activities of all four projects aimed to have tangible impacts on the young people who used or benefited from the services in the short term, many also had wider strategic aims – such as developing pilot models to prove the value of new ways of better supporting young people in or leaving care that could, in turn, influence future policy and practice. 

Alongside our grantmaking, we commissioned nfpResearch to evaluate the projects supported. The final report was delivered at the end of 2022. 

Download and read the nfpResearch evaluation report (PDF). 

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GRANT RECIPIENT

PROJECT 

AWARD

Catch22 & The Children's Society

Bright Lights: Developing and implementing a bespoke apprenticeship scheme tailored to the needs of young people leaving care.

£400,000 (2019-2022)

Drive Forward Foundation

Support for young people (aged 14-16) in care to transition to adulthood and further or higher education and/or work.

£151,000 (2019-2022)

Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust 

Lighthouse is a start-up organisation, which is ‘incubated’ by Catch22. It is working to establish an innovative, not-for-profit care home model to the UK based on a proven approach adopted in Denmark and Germany, where care leavers achieve far better educational outcomes than their peers here in the UK.

£96,000 (2019-2022)
£250,000 (2022-2023)

Become

Developing a theory of change for a five-year pilot project to design a training programme for Personal Advisers who work with young people leaving the care system. 

£530,000 (2020-2025)

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Visit What We Do > Proactive Funding for more information on our current programmes.

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