"At a time when funding for local services has never been tighter - with huge pressure on budgets for children's and young people's services - West London Zone has created a brilliant new model to make our money go further," Leader, Local Authority

 

 

West London Zone benefits from a diverse and sustainable funding model, with each child supported by their local council, their school, and philanthropy, topped up the Big Lottery Fund's Commissioning Better Outcomes fund. This means we are not reliant on one source of funding alone and can provide more support than any of these parties could afford on their own.

In the long term, we aim for a broad mix of mostly local funders who support us by commissioning outcomes so that they have a stake in the transformation of their own community.

We work to ensure that no child ‘falls through cracks’ – and we have designed our funding model in a way to help us deliver this. Our commissioners pay us in instalments over the course of a child’s two-year programme, when we provide evidence of their participation in the programme and their progress at the end.

With payment explicitly tied to each individual, we are driven to achieve for every single child on our programme and are incentivised not to give up on them. We top this up with traditional grant funding in order to reduce risk associated with payment-by-results.

 

"Rather than just writing a cheque and hoping for the best, we wanted to give in a way that makes the project more likely to succeed. Projects like the West London Zone are the future of philanthropy," Philanthropic funder