From Young Grant Maker to Funded Organisation: Closing the Loop on Youth-Led Investment
Every now and then, a funding decision tells a bigger story - this is one such occasion.
Sagal Abdullahi, Co-Founder of Barakah LDN and former Young H&F Grant Maker
This year, nine fantastic organisations were funded through the Young H&F Grant Makers programme. One of them was Barakah LDN, a Fulham-based football collective creating safe, inclusive spaces for Muslim and global majority girls and women.
What makes this decision especially meaningful is who sits behind the organisation.
Several years ago, co-founder Sagal Abdullahi was a Young Grant Maker herself - trained and paid to assess applications, debate priorities, and help decide where funding should go. This year, she returned to the programme from the other side of the table, selected by a new generation of young decision-makers.
“Being a Young Grant Maker was such a unique and empowering experience. It really emphasised the importance of trusting young people with responsibility. To now see Barakah LDN supported through the same programme feels full circle - it shows how powerful it is when young people are not just listened to, but invested in, and highlights that our work is valued by the people we are trying to serve.”
Since 2019, Young H&F’s Young Grant Makers programme has been quietly reshaping the borough’s funding landscape by embedding youth-led decision-making into it. Young people are trusted with real responsibility, trained to understand organisational impact, and paid for their time and expertise. This is not consultation dressed up as participation - it’s genuine youth power in practice.
Support from John Lyon’s Charity has made it possible to sustain and grow this work locally, and that consistency matters. It allows young people not only to influence funding decisions in the moment, but to build confidence, skills and leadership that carry forward into their lives and back into the communities that first invested in them.
And Barakah LDN isn’t the only example of the long-term impact of investing in youth leadership. Over the years, we’ve seen young people stay connected to the Young Grant Makers programme and our Young H&F Collective in different ways as their confidence, skills and leadership grow. One of them is Ealaf Al-Najar, who first came to Young H&F as a Young Grant Maker and then a member of our Collective. In the most recent Young Grant Makers programme, she returned as lead facilitator, supporting a new group of young people through the grant assessment process. Ealaf has reflected on how her confidence has grown over time, and whilst that journey is very much her own, she has told us that being trusted, paid and supported through this programme has played an important part. Today, she also sits on Hammersmith & Fulham’s Youth Council and has spoken in Parliament on more than one occasion - a testament to just how far her youth leadership journey has taken her.
For us, moments like Sagal returning as a funded founder, and Ealaf stepping into leadership roles over time, show what youth-led investment can look like when it’s done properly - not as a one-off initiative, but as part of a system that backs young people to lead, grow, and invest back into the places they call home.
Ealaf Al-Najar speaking in Parliament