#iwill Fund
We’re Co-op’s charity and we work closely with communities, we listen and we learn.
Our £5m #iwill Fund helps us to listen and learn from young people as they make lives better for themselves, their peers and their community. It’s our longest serving funding partnership. Funding partnerships allow us to extend our reach and impact, and learn from other funders too.
We’ve been awarding grants from this fund since 2017 to help young people:
- Tackle youth loneliness – young people are lonely more than any other age group and they told us that peer support was one of the most effective ways to tackle it. Between 2017 and 2019, we awarded £2m of grants to help 19 partners. Read more in this case study from Mencap. Funding built on our wider support for tackling youth loneliness, including our Lonely Not Alone campaign.
- Improve skills, spaces and wellbeing – youth social action works best when a young person is tackling issues from their lived experience. Between 2019 and 2022, we’ve awarded £3.3m of grants to support partners that were giving power to young people to improve youth bereavement support, access to spaces and the transition from primary school to secondary school. This includes £1.2m of follow-on funding for projects in 2022.
Our #iwill Fund helps us build communities of the future imagined by young people through youth activism and shared power. Sign up to our blog for regular updates on the impact of our #iwill Fund partners. Contact Deanne, our Funding & Partnerships Manager, to learn more about our match funding commitments.
The #iwill Fund is made possible thanks to £66 million joint investment from The National Lottery Community Fund and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to support young people to access high quality social action opportunities. The Co-op Foundation acts as a match funder and awards grants on behalf of the #iwill Fund. We currently support 39 projects through our £5.3m fund.
The #iwill Fund supports the aims of the #iwill movement – to make involvement in social action a part of life for young people.
