Learning Launchpad on the hunt for a new intern!

The Learning Launchpad’s exciting summer internship programme is on the hunt for brilliant young people interested in social entrepreneurship, social investing and young people to learn about the work we do at the Young Foundation. Past interns have included: – Manjit More, Teach First Teacher of the Year 2010, who redesigned one of our programmes [...]

The leap of faith and the lonely entrepreneur

Just read this very stimulating post on socialedge about what we expect from Exec Directors and whether its manageable within a single human being. Curtis Change write: They should carry around large cardboard placards with room for the additional titles placed upon them: ·   Chief Financial Officer ·   Chief Information Officer ·   Chief Development Officer [...]

Our top 12 finalists – Learning Launchpad fund summer ’09

After receiving 275 applications to the Learning Launchpad fund for our summer round, we managed to get down to 12 finalists who were invited to a workshop day at the Young Foundation. We had excellent presentations from Mei Yee Hui from Social Enterprise London, Kate Lee from City Life Ltd and Sarah Alderson from TimeBank. [...]

From tiny acorns…

We received a whopping 275 applications to Round 2 of the Learning Launchpad fund. We felt that 110 of these were eligible for investment and expert reviewers from successful web start ups, national volunteering charities and central government have joined us to score these applications against our investment criteria. We blogged feedback to unsuccessful applicants [...]

Lessons from Lisbon

We’re back after a great Social Innovation eXchange Summer School in Lisbon, hosted at the amazing Gulbenkian Foundation, one of the world’s greatest foundations with an outstanding contribution to art and social innovation. Among the many, many things we learned, we wanted to share some lessons and some links: – there is a lot of [...]

Working Rite scoops a Centre for Social Justice award…

Big news for our investee Working Rite, whose Director Sandy Campbell is pictured below addressing an awards audience this week! The CSJ awards ceremony raises awareness of the work of some of Britain’s many exceptional charities, faith-based organisations and good causes who wage a war on social breakdown and poverty. This year they attracted nearly [...]

And the winners are…

We are delighted to announce that, after reviewing over 290 applications, the Learning Launchpad has decided to invest in the three ideas that we think have the most potential to have a national impact on young people’s aspirations and achievements in Britain. They are: • Sandy Campbell and Alan Nicholl from Working Rite who are [...]

Still time to get your applications in

If you’re worrying about whether you’re still in time to send in your applications, worry not. We’ve rejigged the application deadlines for the next two rounds of Learning Launchpad fund investment and the new deadline is now Wednesday 15th July. After that, your next chance to wow us with your smart ideas to revamp British [...]

Faking it @ Number 10!

Two participants of a Learning Launchpad-funded project were invited for breakfast this morning with Gordon Brown just weeks after taking part in Faking It, a two-week transformative programme for young unemployed people based on the TV programme created by RDF media. Jack Stone and Sameer Shahzada were part of a group of 11 young people [...]

Harlem’s promise – lessons from America

We read this interesting article about Harlem’s Children’s Zones this weekend. Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, has done some work showing that the charter schools run by HCZ have amazing results. In his words “they have changed my life as an economist”. If schools like the Promise Academy work in closing the gap between black [...]