Posted By Clore Social Leadership,
18 June 2021
Updated: 16 June 2021
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This #CloreSocialFellowFriday, we sat down with Phil Barron to talk about building a charity from the ground up, collaboration, and his work as the CEO of Young Westminster Foundation. Phil is a 2020 Clore Social Experienced Leader Fellow.
Can you give us a little bit of background information about your role and your organisation?
I was recruited as the founding CEO of Young Westminster Foundation in 2017. We’re part of a network of young people's foundation's, otherwise known as YPF’s, that respond to the severe cuts in funding for youth services and youth clubs. The Young Westminster Foundation acts as an infrastructure for the local area, supporting small charities, youth clubs, churches, and anyone who works with children. We leverage funding from corporations and major funders to give grants to our member organisations. Our main funding priorities are addressing serious youth violence, supporting young people's emotional well being and mental health, and combating youth unemployment.
In addition, we also advocate for youth sector workers as a way to maintain access to these services in the future. From a leadership perspective, we broker partnerships between the charity sector, local authorities, and statutory services. In a sense, we act as the linchpin in the middle, which can be quite a challenging but rewarding position to be in.
Can you share a little more about the process of getting the Foundation up and running?
I was the Foundation's first employee, so when I started it was just me and my laptop. I enjoyed the challenge and creativity of putting together the strategy and developing our membership offer. That being said, it was equally as scary as exciting. As a leader, I also had the opportunity to build the team from the ground up. For me, leadership, it's about being able to be adaptive and empower people instinctively, depending on their experience and skillset.
Since then, we’ve grown to over 100 member organisations, working with children, young people in the borough of Westminster. During the pandemic, our main challenge has been growing as an organisation without working face to face. As a young organisation, team development, team training, and good communication have been crucial to supporting growth.
What projects are you currently working on?
Because we’re quite a small, new organisation, we were able to be very agile to respond quickly to the needs of young people during the pandemic. Digital leadership is more important than ever for our organisations and youth workers to be able to reach young people. At the Foundation and through our partner youth hubs, we’re employing young people to help drive that digital leadership and empowering young people to use the skills that they know best. One of our most significant projects over the last 12 months is called Digital Futures, where we’ve partnered with Westminster city council and fundraised to secure 800 laptops for children and young people in 48 schools.
We’ve also launched a report called Our City, Our Future, which was the culmination of 18 months of research, where we worked with a group of young peer researchers to undertake a needs analysis for young people in the borough. What was clear in that report is that young people want to be more active changemakers. However, they often feel that they aren’t listened to, so that’s something we are responding to.
One of the things Clore Social is focusing on this year is the collaboration, can you share any lessons that you’ve learned?
As you’ve picked up on, collaboration is key to everything we do. In the organisation, we often talk about a ‘community of interest,’ where we bring people together who share a common interest of creating better opportunities for young people in Westminster. There has been a bit of historical mistrust between the third sector and the private sector, but that has changed a lot in recent years. For us, that shared purpose of supporting young people in the borough lies at the heart of all collaboration that we do between organisations.
Another key lesson is to approach the people that you’re working with as individuals who are working towards a common goal rather than organisations protecting their own interests. During the pandemic, I think that we’ve actually seen private businesses recognise the adverse impacts of the pandemic on young people more than ever before. Many of the businesses that we work with have increased their investment over the last year, which has been fantastic, but there's still a lot of work to do. In terms of working with other charities, funding challenges have also made collaboration more crucial than ever before, because you can’t be sustainable while working in silos.
You graduated from the Experience Leader programme in 2020. What parts of the programme have really stuck with you since then?
I found the action learning sets and coaching really powerful, because they helped me adopt a coaching style in my own leadership. For me, the programme solidified my confidence and gave me the space to reflect on some of the more difficult aspects of my role. As a CEO, it can also be easy to internalise things with limited objective external support. The Experienced Leader programme gave me access to a network of other leaders that I hope to see a bit more after the pandemic.
You can find Phil on Twitter @FylipoB and on LinkedIn.
You can find the Young Westminster Foundation on Twitter @YoungWestminstr and Linkedin.
If you would like to be featured for a #CloreSocialFellowFriday, send us an email at info@cloresocialleadership.org.uk.
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