John Lyon's charity Annual Report 2024 - Report - Page 28
COLLABORATION FUND
INTRODUCTION
The pandemic exposed and exacerbated complex challenges
experienced by communities across the Beneficial Area,
challenges that could not be met by a single organisation
alone. Whilst the Recovery Fund focused on enabling
organisations to survive, the wider Home-SchoolCommunity (HSC) Strategy seeks to ensure that postpandemic organisations continue to thrive and innovate.
What is the Fund?
The Collaboration Fund is the most ambitious element
of the six-year HSC Strategy, seeking to bring together
organisations that work across the three most significant
areas of a child’s life: their home, school and community.
The HSC Strategy set out the ambition to develop 12
locally-based collaborations, each responding to a specific
need. Each Collaboration has one school and two to three
voluntary organisations who are known to the Charity
through having previously received funding. Grants are
awarded between Years 2 and 4 of the HSC Strategy,
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JOHN LYON’S CHARITY ANNUAL REPORT 2024
with each grant supporting a collaboration for a duration
of three years. The Young People’s Foundations’ (YPFs)
local knowledge plays a crucial role in scoping and bringing
together the organisations with the Grants Team.
What is the aim and purpose of this Fund?
The Collaboration Fund is designed to develop joint local
delivery models to enable greater sharing of intelligence
and expertise, avoid duplication and bring together unlikely
organisations to try out new ways of working that can
be stifled by siloed operating practices and rigid funding
regimes. Organisations are asked to demonstrate the
views of young people in the identification of the issue the
Collaboration addresses and to be committed to working
collaboratively and transparently with their new partners.
Collaborations are expected to bring an organisation’s
existing expertise and to deliver services or activities within
their usual remit – not to significantly change their purpose
to fit within the Collaboration Fund.
