Fifteen months ago, the cardfactory Foundation and Centrepoint launched the Bright Future Initiative – a £1.5m, three-year partnership funded through our Life Moments Fund, designed to support young people facing homelessness across the UK.
Now firmly into Year Two, we wanted to share what that funding actually looks like once it reaches the young people it’s meant for.
Recently, some of our Foundation team and trustees visited one of Centrepoint’s residential services in North East London, home to 16 young people aged 16-24. We were shown around by the service’s manager, Tracey Jolley, who talked us through how our funding is helping transform a building into a home.
A garden transformed with a specially requested pergola, a new communal living space with a TV, PlayStation and exercise equipment, and a fully stocked coffee corner. Simple improvements, but each designed with a clear purpose – to give young people a reason to leave their rooms, spend time together, and build relationships.
This is part of Centrepoint’s Psychologically Informed Environment approach, or PIE – recognising that many of the young people Centrepoint supports have experienced trauma, and that a safe, welcoming physical space is often the first step towards feeling settled enough to move forward. Crucially, the young people themselves help shape these spaces, so they reflect what residents actually want and need from home, not what someone else assumes they should.
Our funding sits behind more than decor too. It supports Centrepoint’s specialist PIE team, including training and regular reflective practice sessions, where frontline staff work alongside psychologists to better understand and respond to the challenges young people bring with them. This quarter alone, 143 Centrepoint staff completed PIE training. A further 119 staff from Centrepoint’s wider network of over 100 youth homelessness charities also completed the training, helping extend trauma-informed care well beyond our direct partnership.
Of those trained, 97% said they felt confident the skills they’d learned would make a real difference in how they support young people.
Rendon Lodge is one of several homes benefiting from this funding – six accommodation services, home to 71 young people in total, have had similar improvements made this quarter through our funding.
On the clinical side, Centrepoint’s in-house psychologists saw 63 young people in the last quarter, with all of them reporting an improvement in their quality of life. Within that, the Neuropsychological Pathway, for young people who’ve often had no other route to a diagnosis, has supported 45 young people since launching, with 11 receiving a neurodivergence diagnosis and the majority getting help accessing housing, healthcare or benefits they were entitled to but couldn’t previously reach.
Meeting Tracey’s team and some of the young people living there demonstrated to us how this long-term programme is all about relationships, built over months, between people who show up consistently. Across Centrepoint, this quarter alone, 814 young people have benefited from the support our partnership funds – Rendon Lodge is just one home among many.
Looking ahead, we’re piloting Get Set Go, a new strand of the partnership with cardfactory PLC – eight young people supported by Centrepoint will spend two weeks in classroom training followed by placements across four stores, working towards a Customer Service qualification while gaining valuable experience in a retail environment.
Visits like this remind us that behind every statistic is a young person building a brighter future. We look forward to continuing our work with Centrepoint to ensure more young people have the support, stability and opportunities they need to thrive.
Thank you to Tracey and the whole team for having us, and giving us an insight into the life-changing work you do every day.
More reading
The ripple effect: Strengthening youth homelessness support nationwide
How our partnership with Centreoint is transforming young lives
