Youth Challenge Fund: Fact Sheets

Fact Sheets

September 1, 2009

“THE YCF WAY”: YOUTH CHALLENGE FUND ACHIEVEMENTS TO DATE

Background
Since 2006, the Youth Challenge Fund has challenged the community to embrace the great ideas of young people. It has collaborated with youth leaders, the private and public sectors, community-based organizations and individual donors to support a new approach to community building that puts young people in the driver’s seat. The most effective solutions to problems confronting young people in our most underserved neighbourhoods – disengagement, violence and barriers to accessing education, employment and safe spaces – are youth-led solutions.

The Youth Challenge Fund has defined a new way of working that engages those young people who have been the hardest to reach through traditional youth programs.

YCF’s model of youth development is grounded on four pillars:
- Youth-led: Youth leadership is at the core of all YCF initiatives. They brought their ideas to the table; community partners lent support to help bring these ideas to fruition.
- Community-based: YCF targeted resources to 13 neighbourhoods in the city most in need of investment to ensure solutions to existing problems were rooted in the communities where these young people live.
- Collaborative partnerships: YCF mobilizes, convenes and engages youth, community service organizations and institutions to build relationships with each other and develop skills to do their work in a new, more effective way.
- Systemic change: By putting youth at the centre of community development, YCF is changing the way institutions work with young people and ensuring programs are more relevant, successful and sustainable.

To support this unique approach to youth development, the Youth Challenge Fund has achieved the following:
- Invested $42.5* million in 111 unique youth-led initiatives in Toronto’s 13 priority neighbourhoods.
- Mobilized the private and public sectors to come together to support a common cause.
- Enabled over 1,000 young people to play direct leadership roles in developing and implementing initiatives.
- Ensured an additional 5,000 youth have learned new skills and been engaged in their community through new programs, services, supports and mentorship.
- Helped create 17 youth-designated spaces across the priority neighbourhoods, with 17 more currently in development.
- Facilitated collaborative partnerships between young people, community-based organizations and public institutions.

* After an initial provincial investment of $15 million, United Way Toronto leveraged additional provincial matching funds by raising $15.8 million through generous donations from the private sector and individuals. The total commitment to the Youth Challenge Fund was $46.6 million.