I am delighted to share the Berkeley Foundation Annual Review 2023 with you. The review brings to life the work we have funded in the last year, and the impact it has had on young people and their communities across London, Birmingham and the south of England.
Our charity partners are tackling homelessness, supporting young people into work, improving health and wellbeing, and developing the young leaders of tomorrow. In the depths of a cost of living crisis that is pushing more people into poverty, their services are more important than ever.
In the last 12 months we have launched two new major Strategic Partnerships. We are working with Groundwork London to develop an environmental youth leadership programme (p.38), supporting young people to build their leadership skills and use social action to transform local green spaces. In the context of rising youth homelessness, meanwhile our partnership with New Horizon Youth Centre (p.18) is providing critical frontline services for homeless young people across London.
We have continued to invest in the resilience of voluntary sector organisations. This year, we gave additional unrestricted grants to many of our charity partners to help them cope with rising costs. We also invested a further £300,000 through our Resilience Fund (p.44), partnering with ten small-to-medium-sized charities working to support the mental health of young people from Black and minoritised communities.
Young people have played a more important role in our work than ever before. For the first time, we hosted a Youth Panel as part of our grant-making process (p.40), with brilliant young people from our partner charity Salaam Peace. This is something we hope to do much more of in years to come.
Finally, a huge thank you goes to our Berkeley Group colleagues, and Berkeley’s network of subcontractors. Their engagement and commitment to fundraising and volunteering reached new heights this year, with a record £991,000 raised through fundraising events and payroll giving (p.8).
The achievements featured in our Annual Review wouldn’t be possible without our network of partners and supporters. Thank you for being part of this journey, and I look forward to working together over the coming year.
Sally Dickinson
Head of Foundation