We are dependent on membership subscriptions for our core funding. We supplement this with income generation from
We are an independent charity and a company limited by guarantee, with our own constitution and responsibility for acquiring our own funding. We were set up by a group of interested individuals from organisations from across the youth sector in London, many of whom remain on our board of trustees or our Operations Sub-committee.
We have had a good relationship with the City of London since PYL began in 2005. They provide us with accommodation, finance, IT, legal and other back office services (for all of which we pay), and within our constitution they have the right to a place on our board of trustees. We are, however, quite separate, as an independent charity and company limited by guarantee. Because we are linked to the City of London IT system, we have had @cityoflondon.gov.uk email addresses; however, we are now able to use @pyl.org.uk addresses which will become the usual way of contacting us, although our City ones will continue to work.
As a membership body for youth organisations in London, our mission is to support, improve and promote services for young people: to achieve this, we support practitioners to work with young people. That support comes in the form of seminars, information and policy briefings, consultancy services, working groups, management of consultations and representation on regional groups. Our role is to broker relationships between organisations across London, to enable them to learn from each other.
It is not our role – nor do we have the capacity – to work directly with young people, although we trust that the work we do with practitioners brings positive improvements for young people as a result. From time to time we commission pieces of work with young people, such as the consultation and training activities undertaken for the Achieving Excellence in Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance programme for the Regional Planning Group in 2009.
We are not a charitable trust, and do not have funds available for young people or organisations to apply for. We do, however, address the issue of funding in several ways:
We fulfil that function, and we sometimes refer to ourselves as the regional youth unit. This is not to disregard the importance of youth work as a discipline; it is to reflect the great breadth of our remit, including the 14-19 agenda and wider services for young people, as well as youth work. It is this range of work that led to our being called Partnership for Young London, and not the London Regional Youth Work Unit. We collaborate with our colleagues in the other regions, and are part of the Network of Regional Youth Work Units – England.