Ten youth homelessness charities have joined together to attract national corporate fundraising partnerships in a new campaign to ‘End Youth Homelessness’.
Launched last night in London, 'End Youth Homelessness', led by Centrepoint, is designed to entice large corporate partners to fund youth homelessness services. With no one large national youth homelessness charity, the ten organisations have banded together to attract these lucrative national deals and overcome the barrier that many smaller and regional charities face when targeting large, national corporate partnerships.
Nick Connolly, head of corporate partnerships at Centrepoint, told civilsociety.co.uk that the charity first came up with the idea for such a campaign about four years ago, but has been working on the concept – and piloting a launch partner – before launching to the public yesterday.
The campaign has already raised more than £400,000 through corporate partner Taylor Wimpey and Connolly said that partnerships with Dune and CLC are due to start soon.
End Youth Homelessness will be an ongoing campaign. Connolly said that internally the campaign is very ambitious, but it is early stages and will not reveal specific fundraising targets.
“At the moment we’re just making sure that we cover our costs and deliver high quality partnerships so that down the line we can deliver some really huge partners and generate a huge amount of money,” he said. “We’re competing with some very large, very credible charity brands that have been doing this for a very long time so we’re more focused on doing a good job right now.
“But we’re quite confident that we can generate a lot of money.”
Ending youth homelessness?
Asked whether the campaign will be able to end youth homelessness, Connolly said this was a challenge set by Centrepoint’s patron Prince William which had focused the organisation’s mind.
“To say that there will never be a homeless young person again is maybe not feasible, but we can make a real dent. There are 80,000 young homeless people in this country. We’ve got to be able to do a significantly better job than that,” said Connolly.
“Once you get those young people in a supportive environment, you can work to stop them becoming long-term homeless. You can help to develop their literacy and numeracy skills. You can help them address their mental health issues. With voluntary income you can transform young homeless people into successful, independent adults.”
The money raised by the campaign will be directed to broadening services already provided by the charities involved. He said there is no statutory income to support services such as finding accommodation for young people or education.
The fundraising campaign will be accompanied by a policy campaign which will attempt to make funding for youth homelessness services a political priority.
The ten charities currently engaged in End Youth Homelessness are Centrepoint , Llamau, the Rock Trust, St Basils, YPSF, St Edmunds Society, the Society of St. James, the Amber Foundation, Roundabout and Keyhouse. The first six of those are ‘hub’ charities which will split centrally raised money evenly. The other ‘affiliate’ charities will benefit from local and regional fundraising near them by companies joining the national campaign.
Connolly said that the campaign expects other charities to join in the future.
In 2011 the government launched a national £20m fund for homelessness charities to deal with rough sleeping, on the premise of 'No second night out'. The fund, however, closes this year and was never targeted towards youth homelessness.
