Teen Action secures support from Propel funding collaboration, through the City Bridge Trust.
Teen Action has secured a game-changing grant from the City of London Corporation’s charitable funder, City Bridge Trust, through the Propel initiative, a long-term funding collaboration that will give the capital’s civil society and communities the flexibility, trust and capacity to make long-term, systemic change in London.
Over the next 12 months, we will be undertaking an extensive research project into barriers to employment and historically high levels of poverty for young women across our community.
We wish to explore why certain communities and demographics experience higher-than-average poverty, and most notably low-level employment. The employment scene in this community is quite unusual. Whilst there are high levels of poverty, unemployment is not particularly high, yet well over 60% of families are in low-paid employment for reasons such as lack of qualifications, language barriers, cultural/religious barriers to employment, and caring commitments.
We not only want to further explore what the barriers are, but also see how we can bring about change by engaging with different stakeholders (at a local, public and strategy level), and most importantly ensure that interventions are person-centered, and put the religious and societal needs of the young women experiencing this at the center of any work to resolve this.
We are particularly interested in exploring possibilities for those entering employment and setting up financial futures for the first time, so that we can make change at the earliest
possible point in a young adult’s employment and/or independence journey. It is particularly the women in this community who are unemployed and/or in low-level employment, echoing a wider gender gap in society as a whole.
We have been supporting young women at a grassroots level for close to 2 decades! We feel that there still is much more to be done to reverse poverty and deprivation within the community and we want to further explore this so that our response can be meaningful, data & beneficiary driven, innovative and collaborative. What sets us apart is our curiosity, youth leadership and ability to innovate. More specifically, more than a decade of delivering training, skills development, mentoring and career guidance puts us in a position where we already have a very good understanding of the systemic issue we’re exploring and what has or hasn’t worked in the past, as a base from which to progress further with our exploration.
As our CEO, Ms Elisheva Phirer says, “After close to 2 decades at the forefront of poverty relief efforts and youth provisions in our community, we look forward to working with young people to explore the root causes of this, and investigate what kind of systemic change is needed to reduce inequality, low-level employment and poverty for young women.”
Propel is powered by London Funders and is being supported by a growing list of funders, including Bloomberg, City Bridge Trust – the City of London Corporation’s charity funder – The National Lottery Community Fund, the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and main advice funders, such as Trust for London, coordinated by London Legal Support Trust. More information about the Propel collaboration is available here.
