Go! London Fund
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has launched the capital’s biggest ever community sports fund to help under-served and vulnerable young Londoners to access and enjoy sport and physical activity.
Go! London will see £19.5m being spent on improving the lives of young Londoners facing physical, social, economic, or educational challenges.
About the Partnership
Go! London aims to use sport and physical activity to empower young people to fulfil their potential by improving physical and mental wellbeing, safety, employability, and community relationships.
The fund has been established as part of a ground breaking new partnership between City Hall, which has given £4.5M, The London Marathon Foundation and Sport England, which have given £7.5M respectively, supported by London Marathon Events and London Sport, to improve the accessibility of sport across the capital.
The partnership aims to invest at least £10m into grassroots sport and physical activity initiatives by 2025 and to leverage an additional £3m into the Go! London fund by 2027.
Applications for the first set of grants open today, with charities, youth groups, social enterprises and faith groups able to apply for grants of up to £150,000 this month to improve existing sport and physical activity programmes and deliver new services, such as youth mentoring and extra support for young people with special educational, disability and mental health needs.
The fund will run for at least five years from March 2023 with several funding opportunities available later this year and in 2024.
Funding Criteria
Beneficiaries of the Go! London fund will be children and young people aged 4-24 who:
- have special educational needs, are deaf or have other physical and learning disabilities;
- have been, or are, excluded from school or college;
- are not in education, employment or training (NEETs);
- have, or are, associated with gangs or impacted by exploitation;
- are experiencing, or have been impacted by, domestic violence and abuse;
- refugees or asylum seekers;
- have a social worker (looked after children, those with a protection plan, children in need and care leavers);
- come from low-income families and or those living in poverty; and
- are less active or inactive.
The following will be eligible to apply for funding:
- community, charity and voluntary sector organisations;
- sports development organisations;
- social enterprises;
- young people led organisations;
- young Individuals (aged 16-24) including start-ups and perhaps with a fund holder organisation to start off with – testing grants only;
- schools; and
- faith groups.
Find out more about the fund by clicking here.
