John Lyon's charity Annual Report 2024 - Report - Page 30
Funding is awarded to each organisation individually for
three years. The individual funding arrangements can feel
counter intuitive to the focus on Collaboration expected of
the partners but are designed to ensure that no individual
partner becomes the ‘lead organisation’ and changing the
power imbalance of a deeply collaborative approach. It is
also intended as damage limitation exercise if a partner
needs to withdraw once funding has been awarded to
ensure that remaining partners can continue with their
role in the collaboration. The complexity and development
time needed for each cluster is substantial. For example, it
took between three months to a year to progress from the
initial discussions with a YPF, to the funding applications
being submitted for the first six Collaborations. Working in
a Collaboration that requires each partner to give up some
autonomy and push their organisation’s boundaries for the
bigger goals of the group can be incredibly challenging and
is not for every organisation. Space and time during the
process needs to be created to ensure organisations can
step away before the application stage if it is not right for
them and still comfortably operate locally alongside the
other organisations in their usual local role.
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JOHN LYON’S CHARITY ANNUAL REPORT 2024
CONCLUSION
The Collaboration Fund has proved an exciting and
challenging opportunity for schools, organisations, the YPFs
and John Lyon’s Charity to work differently together. It has
been fascinating to see the Collaborations evolve. Each is
quite different in terms of the local partners and the issues
focused on but as they develop, common themes of the
benefits and challenges of this way of working are emerging.
With six Collaborations funded in the first three years and a
further six in development, the Charity is optimistic as to the
deep long-term impact on children, young people and their
families that this more holistic way of working will have.
