Double success with London Youth and Talent Match

Earlier in the year, London Youth invited applications to become their key partners to deliver the Talent Match programme in London. 

We are delighted to announce that our two partnership applications to London Youth - with Collage Arts and Rinova consortium members for a local delivery partnership in North London and with the Princes Trust for the pan-London Enterprise gateway - were the ones chosen by London Youth.

The Big Lottery Fund has invested £100m UK-wide in Talent Match - a new employability programme which over the next five years will aim to create opportunities for young people aged 18-24 who have been out of work, education or training for more than a year.

After all the hard work we did together to develop the partnerships for these initial applications, London Youth, with all its successful partners and its Youth Board, has taken its Talent Match concept in London further and has submitted a detailed business plan to the Big Lottery Fund. These partners include Hackney CVS and Community Links (in terms of other 'geographical' leads), our ERA partner Gingerbread (Specialist Support for Young Parents and Carers) and 3SC (for Young People with Disabilities). 

If the business plan submitted by London Youth is accepted, the programme is expected to go live in January 2014.  You can see some of our preparation here. Richard Parkes of Rinova said "It has been a real pleasure to work with our partners and with London Youth on our ideas to support the Talent Match concept - an amazing and imaginitive initiative led by effective practice and youth work principles. This opportunity to do something 'different' over the next five years is very badly needed in London given the worsening position of long-term youth unemployment. We are all keeping our fingers crossed for some further good news from the Big Lottery Fund later in the year".