Pears Foundation

Pears Foundation has a long history of supporting organisations that give young people opportunities to get involved in social action including Girlguiding UK, the Scout Association and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Our focus has been on ensuring the sustainable growth of high-quality youth social action opportunities through a combination of long-term, core funding alongside supporting research, pilots and place-based learning projects.

This experience led Pears Foundation to take a leadership role in the #iwill campaign, a national movement launched in 2013 to make social action part of life for young people across the UK. Alongside providing core funding for Step Up To Serve, which coordinated the campaign, we worked with Government to explore how match funding could bring significant new investment into youth social action, giving more young people the opportunity to contribute to their communities, develop skills and have a voice in the world around them

We were one of the first independent funders to partner with the national #iwill Fund, established by Government and the National Lottery Community Fund in 2016. Our £5 million commitment was matched, creating a £10 million Pears #iwill Fund to expand opportunities for young people to volunteer and take part in social action.

We focused our funding particularly on health and social care, where there was significant potential to involve more young people in volunteering. Through partnerships with NHS trusts and voluntary organisations, the Fund helped create new opportunities for young people to contribute to health services while developing their own confidence, skills and experience. More than 30 NHS trusts received funding to develop youth volunteering programmes, alongside investment in research, learning and infrastructure to strengthen volunteering across the health service.

The Fund also enabled us to support youth social action in education and invest in organisations and initiatives that strengthened the wider sector. Throughout, our approach combined direct opportunities for young people with investment in the organisations, evidence and infrastructure needed to make high-quality youth social action more widely available and sustainable.

Although the Pears #iwill Fund has now concluded, its legacy continues through the programmes, partnerships and learning it helped establish. It demonstrated the potential of philanthropy, Government and civil society working together to increase both the scale and quality of opportunities for young people to contribute to their communities.