Child poverty innovation and supporting communities grant: grants awarded

The following lead organisations have been awarded funding under the grant scheme in 2025 to 2026: 

• Afan Arts: the aim of the project is to improve self-esteem, build aspirations and develop digital skills in young people. The project empowers participants with opportunities in graphic design, podcasting, filmmaking and communication, enhancing confidence and employability, ultimately aiming to lift young people out of poverty, creating brighter futures within their communities.
• Powys County Council: this project will build on existing partnership working and collaborative activity linked with the Child Poverty Task Force in Powys. They will work to further understand the unique challenges faced by communities and individuals in Powys, hear their truth, and seek to take immediate, medium and long term action.
• Mind Cwm Taf Morgannwg will explore the emotional and behavioural causes of poverty through focus groups and other engagement. By understanding this they can identify ways to improve education and advice to break the cycle of child and family poverty. Additionally, they will offer money management and mental health resilience information and advice.
• Can Cook: to stop food deprivation threatening how children live their lives. To put into place a long-term, good food solution ensuring every child eats well, every day.
• VIBE Youth CIC Pathways to Equity is a youth-led innovation project tackling child poverty across South Wales. Through co-designed labs, family support hubs, and real-time research, it empowers young people and communities to shape solutions, influence policy, and build resilient futures grounded in lived experience, equity, and local collaboration.
• Cwmpas: working across sectors, they will empower young people to design new social business ventures and forward thinking solutions to critical social and environmental challenges facing communities in Wales. With expert support and access to tools and networks, participants will bring their vision to life and turn business ideas into reality.
• Swansea Bay University Health Board: their partnership project will provide opportunities for children and young people (CYP) from WIMD identified deprived areas of Swansea Bay University Health Board (SBUHB) region to engage in synergistic Food, Nature, Arts initiatives to improve their wellbeing, learn skills, build confidence, improve peer, familial relationships, community connectedness and give CYP a voice.
• Bengal Dragons CIC: the Community Football and Food Project will offer free football sessions and nutritious meals to children in poverty in Cardiff, improving health, tackling food insecurity, and building community resilience. Delivered by Bengal Dragons in partnership with Naseeha Youth Project, it creates a lasting support network for families through sport, nutrition, and collaboration.
• Children in Wales: expansion to new areas, and further development of, an innovative ALN/Neurodiversity training programme for professionals, designed/delivered by parents with lived experience of poverty and ALN to promote awareness of the realities of raising children with differences and promote affirming practice and community support for children, families dealing with poverty and ALN.
• Newport City Council: to engage children, parents, guardians and early years practitioners on developmental milestones for school readiness. To use the feedback to inform the testing of different approaches to enable children, families living in poverty to meet their developmental milestones and be ‘school ready.’
• StreetGames: this project tests the impact of StreetGames Doorstep Sport Activators (DSAs) in developing future community leaders. By engaging young people in local sport activities, it explores leadership potential, community engagement, and personal growth, aiming to create sustainable pathways into volunteering, training, and leadership roles within underserved communities.
• Contact Cymru: this partnership will provide trusted, personalised practical and emotional support to parent carers of disabled children in Conwy and Gwynedd through 1:1 sessions, workshops and codesigned resources. Together, they will increase household income, improve financial understanding and wellbeing and share learning through a national event to support sustainable change.
• Citizens Advice Denbighshire: the project embeds specialist advisers within Denbighshire’s Family Link service, providing early, community-based access to welfare, debt, and housing advice in education settings to struggling young families. This innovative ‘one-stop shop’ collaboration improves support pathways and empowers families in poverty to thrive through trusted, joined-up help where they already are.
• Mid and North Powys Mind: children and young people’s support service in north Powys. Focus: Reducing poverty and improving mental health. They will offer services that support young people and their families to improve their financial situation. By facilitating improvements to mental health, they will support with reducing financial hardship and improve pathways to education/employment.
• Abergele Community Action: will target young people aged 16 to 19 who experience poverty, disadvantage and discrimination and are excluded from social, educational, economic and digital opportunities. They will provide employability support, life skills and personal development to create pathways out of poverty, building resilience and personal growth, enabling them to realise their potential.
• Aneurin Leisure Trust, a not-for-profit organisation, partnered with StreetGames and Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council Services, aims to tackle child poverty in Blaenau Gwent. The project will strengthen local collaboration, lower costs, and focus on wellbeing, ensuring children and families receive essential support.
• Welsh Refugee Council: this project tackles child poverty among sanctuary-seeking families, by delivering accurate data and mapping of needs in key dispersal areas, (filling a critical gap in current Child Poverty statistics). It drives change through evidence-based solutions, cross-sector collaboration, a centralised accessible toolkit, and a bespoke training programme for key LA staff.
• Fiery Jacks Cic: a new partnership between Splott Community Volunteers and Fiery Jacks to build youth-led, creative and food-inclusive youth provision for teenagers in Splott. By combining SCV’s food poverty expertise and community base with Fiery Jacks’ youth circus and playwork model, they aim to reduce poverty’s impact and improve youth wellbeing.
• The Welsh Sports Foundation: will tackle child poverty by removing financial barriers to sport. Partnering with local agencies, they will provide vouchers for subscription costs or lessons, redeemed by activity deliverers. Building on a successful pilot in north Wales and Cardiff, the project will now scale up to support more children across communities in Wales.
• Raw Performance CiC: the Fit 4 Change Project aims to empower individuals in poverty through group exercise, nutritional guidance, and wellbeing practices. It fosters physical health, confidence, and teaches positive communication and stress management to families. The project builds community cohesion, promoting resilience and sustainable habits to break the cycle of poverty.
• National Youth Arts Wales (NYAW): "Creative Futures" will provide free weekly creative workshops to over 200 disadvantaged young people throughout Torfaen and Blaenau Gwent, providing inspiration and guidance on creative industry careers. It will build skills and confidence, support wellbeing and open pathways to real opportunities, aligning with the Welsh Child Poverty Strategy.
• Street Child United: the project aims to empower vulnerable young people in Blaenau Gwent by delivering a Child Rights through Football Curriculum. In turn, they will help them understand their rights, build confidence, and challenge stigma, while upskilling coaches and social workers, and fostering cross-sector collaboration to support young people living in poverty.
• Swansea MAD: this project amplifies voices of young people and youth workers with lived experiences of poverty in Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Bridgend. Through participatory workshops and knowledge transfer, it seeks to build a rich/nuanced understanding of lived experience and empower young people and youth workers to co-create solutions.
• The Venture: building on the Children’s Commissioner’s ‘No Wrong Door’ report, this project aims to reduce the effects of child poverty by creating additional capacity to help more families access services. Trusted staff will boost support, engagement, and partnerships using community knowledge across The Venture, The Land, and Gwenfro Valley adventure playgrounds.
• Oasis: a new collaboration to develop a network of free childcare and play providers and map and increase provision, suitable for asylum seekers and refugees in Splott, Tremorfa, Adamstown and Roath, to alleviate poverty for parents by directly reducing costs and enabling them to study and work.

The following lead organisations have been awarded funding under the grant scheme in 2024 to 2025: 

• Positive Programmes C.I.C Positive Programmes Child Poverty Initiative will collaborate between various sectors and regional partnerships to create a comprehensive support network for young people in Bridgend.
• Valleys Gymnastics Academy ‘Family engagement volunteer role to develop a family engagement programme in the local community’will form a collaborative approach to improving families’ wellbeing for the longer term with funding used to develop and deliver a volunteer programme to undertake community consultation on improving the wellbeing of families in Markham, Caerphilly.
• Area 43 ‘Ceredigion Safe Spaces Partnership Co-ordinator’to manage partnership arrangements in Aberystwyth and Lampeter and develop a model of partnership working that can be replicated through a Partnership Toolkit which will detail governance arrangements.
• Carmarthenshire County Borough Council ‘Maternity and Early Years Transformation for Carmarthenshire’ to provide integrated services for children 0 to 4 years old and their families, targeting areas where there are health inequalities, disadvantage and deprivation.
• Ceredigion County Council ‘Connecting communities to boost financial wellbeing’ will improve the way that Ceredigion Public Service Board Poverty sub-group engages with and co-produces solutions with staff, volunteers and users of warm welcome spaces, community cafes and food banks.
• Citizens Advice Pembrokeshire ‘Turning Words to Action’will take forward key recommendations of recent research with Pembrokeshire people that have experience of poverty, piloting some of the ideas put forward by participants, encouraging co-production with those with lived experience.
• Hayaat Women’s Trust ‘Cardiff Partnership Alliance of Somali led organisations to impact child poverty’ aims to create a sustainable impact on child poverty in Cardiff's Somali communities through targeted, integrated support services, establishing satellite hubs, this project will empower families, enhance access to essential services, and build community resilience.
• Monmouthshire Housing Association ‘Child Poverty and Cost of Living Confident Scheme’ project seeks to leverage collective knowledge and best practices to develop comprehensive face-to-face and e-learning training programmes centred on child poverty.
• Swansea Council for Voluntary Service ‘Swansea Solution Focused Schools’will work with three secondary schools and aims to demonstrate that through relationship-building and genuine listening, the experience of learners in low-income households can be improved.
• Trivallis ‘Rise Strong: Thriving Families and Communities with Money, Learning, Health, and Confidence’ will work with communities to co-produce a ‘Rise Strong’ programme of support, sharing resources with communities, and enabling communities to tap into public and other assets in Rhondda Cynon Taf.
• Wrexham County Borough Council ‘Partnerships Officer Prevention and Early Help’ will recruit a partnership officer to conduct a mapping exercise and to identify the gaps in support that have the highest priority need of collaboration.
• Actif North Wales ‘Actif North Wales Placed Based Approach Pilot’will take an Asset-Based Community Development approach, working closely with communities to identify and build on what is strong in their place to address local challenges and tackle inequality. The aim of the project is to use being active and movement as a tool to support children facing poverty, providing low cost or free fun and accessible opportunities in the local community.
• Bevan Foundation ‘Cross-sector collaboration to reduce poverty amongst children with no recourse to public funds (NRPF)’will consolidate the new NRPF Coalition, enabling effective and innovative engagement between charities, local authorities and community groups to improve responses to poverty in children and families with restricted access to the welfare system and produce resources to support this.
• Breastfeeding Network (BfN) ‘Partnership approach to enhancing breastfeeding awareness and culture in low-prevalence socially deprived areas’ BfN will collaborate with Public Health Wales Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board (CTMUHB) and Aneurin Bevan University Health Board (ABUHB) to deliver breastfeeding advice and support in the low-income communities in Rhondda and Newport.
• Citizens Advice Cardiff & Vale ‘Advice for Families: early intervention advice from Citizens Advice in Schools’will extend the reach of welfare advice services in schools across Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan.
• EYST ‘Generating and sharing new and existing knowledge about how services can effectively address child poverty in minority ethnic communities’will collaborate with a research partner to identify existing successful initiatives in addressing child poverty amongst ethnic minority communities in Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, Wrexham and produce  a Toolkit to help organisations improve their practice.
• Pobl Group ‘No Wrong Door’ will engage people with lived experience of poverty in two regeneration areas, Penderi in Swansea and Pillgwenlly in Newport. Identify what works well and why, where services can better work together, where gaps exist in provision and where collaboration is strong.
• Powys County Council ‘Collaborating for change: Responding to Child Poverty in Powys’ and PAVO will collaborate to undertake pilot initiatives based on evidence gathered from across the County that has helped to design the Powys Child Poverty Task Force Action Plan.
• Save the Children Cymru ‘Cymunedau Ymarfer: Communities of Practice extending the impact and sharing learning will bring partners together to regularly discuss issues affecting children in poverty and share good practice, embedding the voices of children and families within networks and coordinating action across organisational boundaries.
• Swansea Council Tackling Poverty Service ‘A new governance model to capture and promote lived experience for children and young people experiencing poverty in West Glamorgan’ will bring partner together and co-produce and establish a new governance model which provides a forum to capture, share and promote the voice of lived experience for children, young people, families and carers who are experiencing or have experienced poverty.
• Swansea Law Clinic ‘Swansea Neath Port Talbot Community Advice Network (SNPTCAN) Referral System’ will extend the reach of an inter-agency online referral system which allows organisations to make warm referrals to other organisations in place of signposting. This innovative technology encourages agencies to apply good referral practice by ensuring professional, accurate and timely referrals, lifting families out of poverty.
• Voices from Care Cymru ‘Supporting financial resilience of Care Leavers to prevent entry into poverty’will collaborate to create a financial resilience toolkit co-produced by the care experienced young people, supported by the delivery of face-to-face training for professionals.