The Youth Endowment Fund
We’re here to prevent children and young people from becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works and building a movement to put that knowledge into practice.
Every child should grow up safe from harm. Yet far too many are drawn into violence or live with the fear of it. This robs them of opportunity and damages whole communities. We exist to change that — permanently. The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) is an independent charitable trust with a £200 million endowment and a mission that matters. We exist to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence. We do this by finding out what works to prevent violence and by building a movement to put this knowledge into practice. We fund, evaluate and spread the most effective ways to protect young people from violence. We build strong partnerships across government, charities and communities. We work with those closest to children’s lives to make sure decisions are based on evidence, not guesswork.
The YEF is the UK’s largest What Works Centre – finding what works and making this change. It has very strong links across government and across the education, youth, youth justice, policing, children’s services sectors.
Our Strategy
The YEF has a clear strategy which focusing on ‘funding good work’ to ‘find what works’ to ‘work for change’. You can see the strategy summarised in the image below:
Our Success to Date
Since it was founded, the Youth Endowment Fund has been:
- Leading on research: To find what works, YEF has launched more impact evaluations on violence than have ever been undertaken in England and Wales with higher predicted quality than what has gone before.[1] To understand young people’s lives, it has overseen the largest youth-led peer research project on violence the UK has ever seen [2] and the largest annual survey of teenagers on violence.[3]
- Leading on knowledge: YEF has built the largest repository of evidence on violence in the world.[4] It has also built the highly respected YEF Toolkit which summarises the evidence on 36 different approaches to reduce violence.[5] We started publishing authoritative guidance on what needs to change in practice and policy to reduce violence across 7 essential sectors.
- Leading on change: The Youth Endowment Fund has become the go-to organisation for government on preventing young people’s involvement in violence. The organisation regularly advises ministers and civil servants across government – including presenting to the Prime Minister, Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor – advising and delivering change in policy, guidance and inspection. It convenes expert groups across all sectors that vulnerable children rely upon – identifying and pushing for changes. It also funds work directly with schools, youth justice services and local authorities supporting organisations to do great work to keep children safe.
The Future
Over the coming years the Fund is looking to:
- Build even deeper knowledge of what works – filling key gaps in what is known.
- Deliver further practice and policy change to ensure a continued reduction in levels of violence.
- Design the right strategy for the future of the Fund.
[1] https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/funding/evaluations/
[2] https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/peer-action-collective/
[3] https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/children-violence-and-vulnerability-2025/
[4] https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/evidence-and-gap-maps/programmes-evidence-and-gap-map/