United St Saviour’s Charity grants nearly £800,000 to ten Southwark community organisations
The first of core grants round under our new Community Investment Strategy backs exceptional community leaders delivering deep, lasting work across the borough.
United St Saviour’s Charity is proud to announce grants totalling nearly £800,000 to ten organisations working across Southwark. This first major round under our 2025–2030 strategy represents our longest commitments, our largest awards in a single round, and a shift to funding that works collectively across the borough.
Each organisation will receive three years of core funding. This money that goes towards the daily costs of running their organisations, including rent, salaries or insurance, enabling impact beyond single projects and giving stability to plan ahead and focus on the people they serve.
United St Saviour’s has been part of Southwark for nearly 500 years. That history shapes how we work. We are an embedded funder making decisions from within the community. We know this borough, its neighbourhoods and its people. We show up, we listen, and we back organisations for the long term. The ten partnerships announced today reflect the breadth and depth of Southwark, spanning Rotherhithe and Walworth; early years and older adults; youth clubs and asylum seeker services. We are proud to stand alongside every one of them.
“We are walking alongside an extraordinary group of organisations, including long-standing partners, organisations that are new to us, and those taking their first steps into larger grant funding. What unites us is a commitment to knowing our communities deeply, showing up consistently, and building trust that makes real change possible. Together, we believe long-term, side-by-side partnership can deliver equity, power and prevention. We are proud to stand with them for the years ahead”. Barbara Reichwein, Head of Community Investment
The organisations are:
- Ballers Academy Foundation in partnership with Bizzie Bodies: A collaboration between two Rotherhithe organisations combining community football and science and technology activities for young people. Working together around Canada Water, they offer young people free, accessible provision in an area that is changing fast and has historically had fewer services for families and teenagers.
- Burgess Sports: Based in Walworth and the Aylesbury Estate, Burgess Sports has been running free sport and activities for local young people for years. Young people help shape the programme through a Youth Board and ambassador scheme, and nine have gone on to become qualified coaches — a genuine progression from participant to community leader.
- Community TechAid: Every week, hundreds of Southwark residents are effectively shut out of essential services because they don’t have a working device or the skills to use one. Community TechAid refurbishes donated technology and provides free digital skills support to over a thousand people a year, working with more than 200 local partners to reach people who need it most. Community TechAid serves every ward in borough.
- Esports Youth Club: Many young people simply don’t connect with traditional youth clubs — but they do play video games. Esports Youth Club uses gaming as a genuine hook, running structured sessions that build friendships, confidence and digital skills. They’re also developing real links into the UK games industry, opening up career routes that young people from Southwark wouldn’t otherwise have access to.
- Home-Start Southwark: Families with young children, from birth to age five, who are going through a difficult times get a helping hand and a shoulder to lean on from this charity. Trained volunteers visit families at home, building genuine relationships over months and helping when its needed most. Midwives, health visitors and family hubs all refer families to this trusted community organisation, and the results (parents feeling more confident, less isolated, more connected) secure a stronger start into life.
- London Bubble Theatre: Based in Rotherhithe, London Bubble has been making community theatre with local people for decades, creating work that brings together ages six to one hundred. Stories are shaped and performed by residents themselves — full of creativity, humour and sharp social observation — and the process builds connection, confidence and a strong sense of belonging.
- Mentivity: With a 20-year track record in Walworth, Mentivity offers trusted, relationship-based youth mentoring through schools, outreach and community programmes. This grant coincides with the official opening of Mentivity House, a youth space that is now the permanent home for this work, and provides a strong platform for the next chapter: a year-round youth club offer, an expanded holiday programme, a new podcast studio, and deepening partnerships with local schools, including respite provision.
- Parent Skills 2 Go: Holistic, culturally sensitive support for Southwark families that is grounded in time, trust and a personalised approach. Parent Skills 2 Go offer parenting support, mentoring, after school care and community outreach, covering everything from cooking to social media to arts and crafts for people from a wide range of backgrounds. Parents are involved in shaping the organisation itself, including as directors, volunteers and supporters.
- Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers: More than 200 people fleeing war and persecution come through the doors of Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers every week. They offer practical help, including advice, emergency support and wellbeing activities, as well as a sense of community for people who have often lost everything. They are a central part of Southwark’s Borough of Sanctuary work, a coalition UStSC is proud to support.
- Stepping Stones Learning & Leisure: Stepping Stones exist to bring together adults with profound and multiple learning disabilities and offer activities and support. Working closely with service user, the charity also supports families to design a programme that genuinely reflects what matters to them.
What we have in common
Our ten partner organisations work in different ways, and have different strengths. But they have something important in common. Each one shows up, week in and week out, in the places where people actually live their lives, including community halls, libraries, parks and homes. Each builds relationships that commonly last years; some have seen multiple generations grow up. Each holds together the practical and the personal, responding to real needs within the borough while investing in people’s capacity to thrive in Southwark.
Together they speak to something we feel strongly about at United St Saviour’s: communities need places to gather and people to trust. Safe spaces, welcoming spaces, and spaces that belong to everyone. That kind of infrastructure, consistent and deeply local, is the foundation on which everything else rests. And it is chronically underfunded.
We see this funding round as a contribution towards maintaining the social fabric in inner cities and look forward to working with our partners over the coming years and celebrating and supporting our shared work.
This announcement falls during A Million Acts of Hope, a UK-wide campaign celebrating the people doing quiet, extraordinary things to make lives and communities better. It feels like exactly the right moment to say thank you publicly to these ten organisations that embody that spirit every single day. Division can feel loud right now. The organisations we are proud to fund are part of the answer to it, showing up, building trust, and making Southwark a place where everyone belongs.
A Million Acts of Hope is about bringing to light that hope is all around us — it’s just not always in the headlines.
Hope isn’t in short supply. And our partners in Southwark demonstrate that everyday.
#MillionActsOfHope
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