ABOUT @CEFLyncx



Community Education Foundation & Lyncx (CEF Lyncx), is a Brixton based community/equity-led Charity that provides diverse range of after-school educational and capacity building services for the benefit of children/young-people in Lambeth. We achieve these objectives through providing safe space where young-people come to engage in diverse range of structured cross-curriculum programmes.

Set up in 2011, Registered Company in 2012 and gained Charity status in 2016, the Charity is rooted in the Lambeth youth community and has over-time, not only developed excellent knowledge/understanding of the needs of the local-community but also a track-record of successful delivery of outcomes recognised by our Local Authority.

Our experience working with our local community has been developed over more than a decade and over this period, we have not only build on our expertise knowledge/understanding of the community but have developed a relationship built on trust and experience pulled from our 'community/equity-led' co-production approach we use to developed and run interventions that are not only fit for the Lambeth youth community's needs but constantly and successfully co-producing the diverse range of interventions run by our Charity and achieving outcomes for all stakeholders.

Current interventions co-produce by CEF Lyncx for the benefit of children, young people and families include;

  1. VS3P (virtual-study-support-schooling-project) supporting 160 primary and secondary school age children with extra learning to help them to improve literacy, numeracy and science attainment with nearly 1,000 children beneficiaries since the beginning of the Covid pandemic
  2. SHARP (school holidays active and recreational programme) runs 6-weekly supporting on average, 150 YP during every school holidays is a diversionary intervention to get young-people physically active, connected, develop skills while diverting them away from the risks of isolation/loneliness and potential coaxing into crime/anti-social activities and it is delivered in a safe space by a young workforce working with Royal-Navy video: https://youtu.be/LQNHfDQ_Uvs?si=q8xWQrNw9SI3nvjG
  3. Our Creative-StEP (Creative Saturdays, the Extra Project) initiative is another youth violence diversionary initiative developed by young people for young people, run by youth people with professionals/experienced adults providing support/nurturing and brings together young-people aged 11 years and over to engage/participate in a positive social-action development process. It is run in a 7-weekly block using a "cross-cutting/curricular" approach that offers opportunity for young-people aged 11-15 year-olds and provides volunteering opportunity for over 16-year-olds. It engages young-people in conversations during each block, encouraging them to identify positive and negative issues affect young-people, explore solutions and express the contents in a story-telling using different creative arts mediums i.e. Music/Dance/Performing-Arts to audiences like https://youtu.be/XFsULdqj-kQ?si=hg1ld9WATD3o1W_4.
  4. Youth Action and Consultative Programmes helping young people develop and improve youth representation/voice at partner housing estate level and represent themselves in positive ways
  5. SENDsational: a targeted/inclusive and life-long skills development interventions for young-people with special-education-needs-and-disabilities (SEND)
  6. Y-Volunteering (Youth-Volunteering-Scheme) attracts over 50 young people year, encouraging/nurturing them develop confidence and employability skills and career/further-education ambition by providing pathways that leads them to achieve improved economic independence while they focus on education.

These interventions together have over the decade of the Charity's existence, has supported over 10,000 young people in Lambeth to for example, achieve improved:

• wellbeing (physical and mental)
• feeling of safety
• awareness of the environment
• academic attainment levels
• connection to and representation of local communities
• employability skills and employment outcomes
• contribution in their local communities

We recognise that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live and the cost of living crisis is ongoing. We therefore, have taken time out to look at ways that we could work with our community to ensure that children, young people and their families who access our services are as much as possible, better prepared to adapt to the changing environment now and beyond

Our response is developed with the expectation that the crisis has and is certainly having adverse impact on many in our community. On one hand, we see that the crisis has some positive environment outcomes and on the other, some challenging social outcomes, for example, how children, young people and their families adapt and manages the impact without compromising some social value outcomes.

The question for us has been how we create a balance between these two critical positions. Our immediate response is informed by our co-production efforts with our community of children, young people and families, Residents/Tenants Management Organisation Partners in Lambeth and the many network conversations is enabling our Charity, Community Education Foundation & Lyncx (CEF Lyncx) to develop our services offers, ensuring that they are fit for purpose i.e. an offer that provides awareness, curriculum learning support and capacity building capable of supporting the needs of our community of children, young people and their families; now and beyond these crisis.