The massive Mayor’s Fund for London City Pitch event held at City Hall on 13^th July 2017, signed off the 2016/17 academic year on a high. This is the 3^rd consecutive year that the Mayor’s Fund for London has run their inter-schools’ competition. City Pitch’s purpose is to challenge young Londoners to think about and solve social action problems in their communities.

The programme, which incorporates leadership, project planning and presentation skills workshops are designed and delivered by Stride – with an overarching purpose to empower London’s children to step up as leaders and make a difference in their worlds while gaining valuable life and employability skills.

The proposed ideas presented at City Pitch, included tackling mental health and loneliness, engaging the elderly, celebrating diversity, and combating knife crime. Young people from six London secondary schools and 6 London primary schools came together at City Hall to successfully pitch community social action ideas to a panel of judges. They each won £1,500 of funding to turn their projects into reality with one school receiving an extra £100 for delivery of their project. The final event saw teams from schools in Lambeth, Newham, Islington, Westminster, Fulham and Enfield each pitching for support for their social action project designed to make a difference to life in their communities:

“The creativity and passion shown by the teams put through to the final event at City Hall was tangible! The build-up, the pitch-writing and the presentation skills honing all showed just how much the children had developed during the process. I’d urge you to take a look at the video below which really captures the pupils’ enthusiasm and determination throughout the process – right up to the big City Pitch day itself.” Says Nikki de Bruin, Co-Founder at Stride. “And now it’s up to them to make it all happen.”

The children’s programme began with a Leadership Day for 60 pupils in each of the 24 London schools. Pupils learned about different leadership styles before starting work on identifying then developing their community projects through brainstorming and problem solving, planning, poster design and then scripting and recording their final pitch presentations. The winning teams from all schools submitted a video in the hope of a place at the big final event at City Hall. Then just 6 finalist teams were put through to the final City Pitch event.

The pitch process is taken very seriously as they are guided through how to put together the perfect presentation. Melanie Grant, Mayor’s Fund for London Trustee explained. “The presentations were really articulate and well put together. There was a lot of passion and a lot of team work.”

The judging panel included a cross-section of industry leaders: Hannah Gurga, Chief of Staff, LCH Group; Darren McCormack, Sales & Marketing Director, Taylor Wimpey; motivational speaker Mr Beezy; Sir Stephen O’Brien, Mayor’s Fund for London Trustee, and Matthew Patten, Chief Executive, Mayor’s Fund for London.

Matthew Patten, Chief Executive, Mayor’s Fund for London said: “Our City Pitch project is a fantastic way to introduce the early development of key business skills in a supportive atmosphere. The initiative boosts aspiration and encourages social responsibility. It’s great to see young Londoners getting involved and taking pride in their community.”

And the Mayor’s Fund for London City Pitch programme, working with Stride, is set to grow in 2017/18, with 36 primary and secondary schools from across London being selected to take part. And it’s all made possible by this year’s funding partner, the international think-tank BE OPEN Foundation who support cutting-edge education initiatives in London.

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