People’s Postcode Lottery

Since 2020, players of People’s Postcode Lottery have helped GFC transform the lives of thousands of children and young people around the world.

Global Fund for Children is quite unlike any other charity that Postcode Lottery supports. Our unique approach to partnering with community-led organizations and providing them with fully flexible grants over many years, results in deep and sustainable change for children and young people, across the world, including throughout Britain.

Funds raised by players of People’s Postcode Lottery support every facet of our work, from Scotland to Zambia.

Earlier this year as we marked 30 years of Global Fund for Children’s work, we were joined by representatives of People’s Postcode Lottery to announce a new and increased commitment to the mission and vision of GFC. We are grateful to the players of Postcode Lottery for this support.

One of the life-changing projects supported by Postcode Lottery took place in April 2022 when over 100 young people aged 14 to 19 from urban and rural parts of Liberia and Sierra Leone attended the first West Africa Adolescent Girls Summit in Liberia. Unlike previous youth summits, this event was designed and created by adolescents for adolescents. 

These young people chose to focus the agenda on contextual issues facing girls in their communities, their countries, and all of West Africa. They also strongly felt that boys should be included in the summit, as the involvement of all people is needed to truly achieve gender equity. The days were filled with workshops and activities that bridged connections and new friendships, raised voices, and ignited an adolescent movement.

Another one of the projects funded by our grant from the Education Postcode Trust is our education work in Brazil and Nepal.

Players of Postcode Lottery are currently supporting community-based partners in Brazil and Nepal working with children aged 6 -12 to access education and return to classrooms, address learning gaps, create and roll-out literacy programs, after-school tutoring, and digital classrooms. They are supporting emotional and social wellbeing and advocating for kids who have been shut out of the education system. They are integrating learning through play into educational activities so that children can engage in playful learning that sparks creativity and instills a love of education and strengthening networks for advocacy and learning so that community-based organizations can connect, exchange learnings, and share innovations for the benefit of the children they are working with.

Players of Postcode Lottery also support our work to improve gender equity and promote healthy masculinities. Too often in the fight for gender equity, the role of boys and men in bringing about positive social change is ignored or even denied. At the height of the COVID pandemic, GFC worked with ten community-based partners working with boys and young men, across the North of England, to explore the impacts of masculinities on their lives. In September 2021, at the end of the pilot, they finally got to meet in person (following extensive and frequently changing lock-down measures across England) to discuss issues facing boys, young men, and masculine-identifying people today, covering the organizations’ work, the wider world, and local communities. From COVID to culture to trans identities to food poverty, each group shared unique insights into how recent events and sociopolitical landscapes have affected this demographic.

The continuation and growth of this Healthy Masculinities initiative is now being funded by the Education Postcode Trust and we are deeply grateful to them for supporting this critical work that is so often overlooked and chronically underfunded.