The abrdn Charitable Foundation (aCF), has announced the recipients of its first two grants awarded through the Innovation Fund launched in October of this year. They are the Drive Forward Foundation (DFF) in the UK and the Institut Louis Germain in France.
Helping young people in London transition from care into successful adulthood
DFF is a UK charity dedicated to empowering young people in London, aged 16–26, to transition from care into sustainable employment, education or training.
A young person who has experienced care is statistically more likely to be unemployed, not receive an education or vocational training, face mental health challenges, become homeless or have a criminal conviction. There are nearly 85,000 children and young people in care in England, showing the scale of the issue.
DFF believes that access to sustainable employment can break this cycle, and it has developed an evidence-based service package tailored to care-experienced young people’s specific needs.
The charity is also convinced that access to mentors and their networks can provide invaluable career guidance and skill development, and open doors to life-changing opportunities.
To unlock the full potential of its mentoring programme and expand it to new levels, DFF applied for a grant to support the implementation of a ‘Digital Career Mentor’ platform. This tech-enabled solution aims to transform the programme by centralising and simplifying mentorship interactions.
The funding awarded will be used to pilot the project over a multi-year period and will allow DFF to best evaluate its long-term impact on our community.
By investing in this bespoke platform, the Innovation Fund will enable DFF to help close the opportunity gap for care-experienced young people, providing them with the mentorship and the professional support network they need to thrive in their careers and beyond.
Enabling talented French students from underprivileged areas to gain continuous educational support
Founded in 2014, the Institut Louis Germain is a French non-profit organisation dedicated to offering educational support to talented students from neighbourhoods in Marseille and Paris. Institut Louis Germain’s in-person tutoring programmes are structured to provide 1000 students aged 11–18 with 120 hours per year of focused academic support over four-day camps during each school break. These camps are intensive, interactive and geared towards reinforcing critical skills in mathematics and literature.
The Innovation Fund has provided a grant to support the Institut’s launch of a Digital Library, which will provide a 24/7 accessible complement to the face-to-face tutoring sessions that take place during the school break, ensuring that students can maintain and deepen their learning throughout the year.
By offering flexible learning formats – from on-demand videos to live sessions – the Digital Library will foster a holistic, student-centred approach to education, ensuring that every student has the tools they need to achieve academic excellence and unlock their full potential.
The Innovation Fund’s ambition
The aim of the Fund is to help the aCF support more charitable organisations around the world to pilot innovative projects aligned with our Tomorrow’s Generation strategy.
The Fund backs projects that are innovative, practical, collaborative and systemic, so they provide learning that can be widely applied to deliver lasting impact.
abrdn directs funding to charitable organisations around the globe through the aCF, with the aim of creating fair and impactful partnerships that are aligned with our strategy, and which engage colleagues to use their skills to benefit society. A key feature of our approach is to support a small number of Powerful Partnerships, typically significant multi-year grants to organisations and projects where the aCF’s support can have a transformative impact. It is hoped the Fund will deliver a significant impact through its support of small to medium-sized projects that could potentially become Powerful Partnerships of the future.
"The abrdn Charitable Foundation has announced its first grant recipients: The Drive Forward Foundation in the UK and the Institut Louis Germain in France. Both charities will pilot projects designed to help young people overcome the challenges they face and achieve their potential through supporting education and employment. The Fund highlights our ambition of fostering innovative ideas to tackle environmental and social issues to benefit our global communities."
Kirsty Brownlie, Senior Social Impact and Partnerships Manager
Thank you to all those who applied for the abrdn Charitable Foundation's Innovation Fund across the world.