Our policy fellowships aim to foster deeper collaborations, creating lasting policy impacts that benefit all Londoners
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Our projects
Explore all the ins and outs of our projects and discover how you can play a part in shaping London’s future
We are excited to be working on a variety of innovative projects aimed at establishing a long-term knowledge brokerage system for London. These initiatives are designed to connect experts, policymakers, and the community to drive impactful change. Discover more about each project and learn how you can get involved below.
Past Activities
London government and London’s Higher Education Institutions, working together for a fairer, greener, and more prosperous city
Our LPIP Phase 1 project will bring together academics, policymakers, businesses, and third sector groups, focusing on the economic, social, and environmental research opportunities of a just transition to net zero, with a particular focus on retrofitting London’s homes.
Despite gathering pace over recent years, retrofitting at scale remains a challenge for London, but also presents an opportunity – for jobs, businesses, and communities. Our LPIP will undertake research and generate ideas to accelerate retrofit, unlocking demand, and increasing supply.
We will approach this from a 'just transition' perspective, ensuring that retrofit and reaching net zero lower living costs, and provide training and jobs, especially for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.
We will identify three significant challenges preventing the decarbonisation of London’s homes and will be organising a series of workshops to better understand and develop solutions to these challenges.
Our ambition is to create an enduring, flexible partnership, unlocking the potential to deliver London’s retrofit and zero carbon goals, and testing and developing effective, sustainable collaboration between policymakers, researchers, businesses, and communities.
Results from our call for new research to inform Mayor of London’s mentoring policy have been published
The Mayor of London’s New Deal for Young People mission is working to ensure that 100,000 disadvantaged young Londoners have access to high quality mentoring opportunities, and that all young Londoners have access to quality local youth activities.
New research makes recommendations to understand and remove the barriers to young Londoners accessing good quality mentoring services.
We appointed a team from the University of East London (UEL), led by Dr Darren Sharpe of the Institute for Connected Communities (ICC) in collaboration with the School of Education and Communities on behalf of the Greater London Authority (GLA).
The aim was to examine mentoring gaps, best practices and challenges in London to help strengthen the roll-out of new programmes as part of the Mayor’s New Deal for Young People mission.
The mapping exercise looked at factors which can prevent young Londoners from taking part in mentoring, such as cultural competency levels, the matching of suitable mentors, the cost of travel and how mentors are trained.
It also found more mentoring provision should be designed to accommodate and target young parents, young carers and young people living with chronic health conditions, who are all currently under-served. Young Londoners shared that they want a mentoring service to create an atmosphere where young people can freely air their concerns and issues and be able to build a trusted relationship with tailored advice and guidance.
The research found young people want to know far more about the purpose of mentoring. Mentoring, particularly for vulnerable young people, brings the benefit of having someone to listen to them and their concerns and give their expert advice in how they can progress in the next stage of their life. It needs to be an early intervention and widely promoted, rather than being accessed as a reactive source of help at a critical time. Mentoring services need a wide pool of diverse people to choose from and Young people not only value skills, but someone who looks like them and has gone through the same or similar experiences.
Dr Darren Sharpe , Deputy Director at the ICC
- Read the key findings [PDF]
We are really pleased to share this mentoring research and the findings are helping to inform our New Deal for Young People mission. We’re building on Dr Sharpe’s recommendations through significant investment in mentoring for the most disadvantaged young Londoners, providing guidance, through our Mentoring Quality Framework, to ensure mentors are well trained and supported, and developing options to help recruit more mentors with diverse backgrounds, ethnicities and experiences. "
David McCollum, Head of the New Deal for Young People
The research was conducted using a mix of young people’s focus groups, and interviews with mentor providers, and surveys with councils, funders and mentor providers.
- Access the full report
A summary of the Levelling Up and London events hosted in September and October 2021.
