Investing in policy influencing
In 2021, Blagrave made the strategic decision to invest in improving youth policy decisions, informed by young people’s systemic disadvantage.
We defined ‘policy’ broadly: influencing government funding decisions, guidance, consultation outcomes, position papers or statements of intent; party manifestoes; or any legislative process. Policy work could be national or local in remit, but we set out to support change that would make a change at the top, with the aim of influencing the systems of which young people are part.
We have a legacy of some incredible work and learning about what it takes to make policy change happen. The most significant learnings were around what works when centring young people in this process. Our programme of work with Common Vision and 9 youth organisations around young people in policy has led to some notable successes so far. These include having care experience formally recognised as a protected characteristic by Leicester city council (Leicestershire Cares), improving access for neurodivergent young people to local consultations (Challenging Behaviour Foundation), and challenging home office policies that increased the cost of indefinite leave to remain applications (We Belong). Learning from this programme of work will be fed into our wider understanding of influencing policy throughout 2025.
At the start of this year, halfway through our strategy, we took a pause to review the impact of the work. Our review identified our unique role in the sector as a smaller funder that has the processes, culture, and knowledge to fund young people directly. We are best placed to seed fund work that goes on to have greater impact and this often means directly funding young people less established in their change-making journey.
We are still developing our future strategy, but we aim to bring young people to the forefront of policy influencing activities. Therefore, we will not be funding policy-influencing activities as a standalone outcome, and instead be focusing our funding on influencing by young people through our Pathways and Challenge and Change programmes. This means that we will not be taking further applications for funding from organisations that are not led-by young people in the policy-influencing space.
By funding young people directly, we aim to achieve the broader outcome of removing barriers to young people accessing policy influencing more widely. This has been historically under-resourced, and it is fundamental to our values that we fund this ecosystem of youth-led change.
We recognise there is likely to be continued interest in funding for legislative policy work by organisations that are not led by young people, and with this firmly in mind we have collated a list of other funders of policy influencing here.
Daniel Newton, Policy and Climate manager