Agenda item

Cabinet Member: Local Communities

Forward Plan Ref: 2019/192

Contact: Fulya Markham, Senior Strategic Commissioning Officer Tel: 07776 997956

Report by Corporate Director of Children’s Services (CA10).

The Youth Opportunity Fund was introduced by Cabinet in 2019 to increase opportunities for young people across Oxfordshire. This fund aims to support voluntary and community organisations to establish new youth opportunities and extend existing activities to additional sessions, areas or groups of young people between the ages of 11 to 18 (25 where young people have special educational needs). The total value of the Fund is £1 million for two years from the date of award, and up to a maximum of £70,000 per application across the two years. Once the available resource is used the Youth Opportunity Fund will be closed.

Following the application process, as per the agreed cross-party decision-making process, the cross-party panel reviewed the applications and assessed them against grant criteria.

This paper sets out the final cross-party panel recommendations for allocation of the Youth Opportunity Fund for decision by Cabinet.

The Cabinet is RECOMMENDED to:

(a)          award a total of £999,800 (details can be found at Annex 2); and

(b)          close the Youth Opportunity Fund.

The Youth Opportunity Fund was introduced by Cabinet in 2019 to increase opportunities for young people across Oxfordshire. Following the application process, as per the agreed cross-party decision-making process, the cross-party panel reviewed the applications and assessed them against grant criteria.

Cabinet had before them a report that set out the final cross-party panel recommendations for allocation of the Youth Opportunity Fund for decision by Cabinet.

Councillor Gill Sanders, local councillor for Rose Hill & Littlemore, thanked the cross-party panel for their work and for supporting the bid from the Rose Hill Junior Youth Club. The funding to this Group and other successful groups would be put to good use. She sympathised with the unsuccessful bidders and referred to the funding agreed at full Council in February to develop an up to date assessment of need and of the services young people in Oxfordshire want and need; to identify whether these services are currently being delivered and to investigate future service delivery options to meet that need. She hoped that this might be a start to replace those services lost as a result of cuts to local government funding.

Councillor Liz Brighouse, speaking as the Opposition Leader and local councillor for Churchill & Ley Valley thanked all those on the cross-party working panel for sifting through all the 95 applications. The volume of applications was an indication of the need to recognise that youth work in Oxfordshire needed to be funded. Organisations were struggling and the grant funding would make a difference.

Referring to her local project it was recommended for funding. In the past her area had had a full-time youth worker who had supported a number of volunteers in addition to young people on the street. There was a video available of the work done. She hoped that some of that legacy could be picked up again.

In thanking Cabinet for the money, she stressed that it was important to learn from how the money was used, with schemes being well evaluated.

Councillor Richard Webber, local councillor for Sutton Courtenay & Marcham, spoke as someone who had served on other panels and was fully aware of the difficult task they faced and the heavy time commitment. There were 71 unsuccessful bids, almost all doing wonderful work. Many of these groups did not understand why they were falling short. No one had heard why they were unsuccessful. In his area the DAMASCUS Youth Project was unsuccessful, but he was speaking for all those unsuccessful groups. Lack of funding could damage groups’ further opportunities to attract funding as they would be unable to demonstrate council support.

Councillor Webber added that the fund seemed to be about innovation with no support for sustainability. He hoped that the Council budget decision referred to by Councillor Sanders would be carried out to understand sustainability issues.

Councillor Webber suggested that Cabinet was being asked to ratify the decisions without all the information in front of them.  He also queried why the Fund had taken so long to get underway from the February 2019 decision. The scheme was not opened to bids until 8 October with a relatively narrow window to submit a bid to 22 November.

Councillor Ian Corkin, Cabinet Member for Partnership and Council Business responding commented that he had taken away from this process the sheer scale of volunteering that went on and thanked all involved. He agreed that council endorsement could be important in securing other funding and suggested that councillors could use the Councillor Priority Fund to help in a small way.

Councillor Mark Gray, Cabinet Member for Local Communities, explained that the funding was not available until April 2019 and that it took time to get the scheme in place. Referring to the comments around innovation and sustainability the aim had been to promote innovation and to galvanise the sector.

Mrs Atkinson, Trustee of Abingdon DAMASCUS Youth Project spoke as one of the bids not recommended for funding. The refusal sounded the death knell for the wholly registered charity. She outlined the valuable work undertaken by the Project and the close partnerships formed with agencies responsible for safeguarding children. She urged Cabinet to reconsider how the money was allocated suggesting that each of the bidders could receive a lesser amount enabling all groups to seek further outside funding.

Councillor Gray commented that youth clubs were a strong way to deliver services to young people and may provide the only positive adult experience for some young people. The reason for not splitting the funding further was that it would have made individual bids untenable.

Councillor Gray, in introducing the report and moving the recommendations thanked all involved in the work of the panel. He commented that the criteria had been kept deliberately wide to attract bids from across the County and. The panel had carried out an evaluation against set criteria in a fair way. The successful bids were distributed throughout the County area. Karen Kuehne added her thanks to James Fawcett, from Voice of Oxfordshire’s Youth (VOXY). They had very much wanted to involve young people and had been lucky that James had been able to be involved.

RESOLVED:             to:

(a)          award a total of £999,800 (details can be found at the Annex to the Minutes); and

(b)          close the Youth Opportunity Fund.