Prince William visits Spiral Skills in Lambeth to champion youth-led prevention
Prince William visited Spiral Skills, a Lambeth-based charity, who have received funding from the Homewards Fund to expand their bold, community-led approach to tackling youth homelessness.
Spiral Skills was founded in 2015 and works with local schools, youth organisations and authorities to provide early intervention, holistic support, employability skills and access to employment and services for underserved 14–25-year-olds. The organisation provides a range of services including career coaching, employment opportunities and workshops to help break the cycles of exclusion and unemployment for young people in the local community.
With support from the Homewards Fund, Spiral Skills has moved into a new multi-agency prevention hub for young people at the Oasis Village in Tulse Hill. This collaborative approach brings together services under one roof, offering accessible, holistic support for young people aged between 14 and 25. The Prince visited this new space to see how this collaborative model offers a wide range of accessible support and how the grant has allowed them to expand, increase staffing and create new spaces such as a wellbeing room.
Prince William attended a workshop with Young Creators UK, an impact-led creative agency run and owned by underrepresented young people, also based in the Oasis Village. The agency receives referrals from Spiral Skills for their young people to be involved in creative projects and training – an example of the collaborative hub model in action. Joined by Homewards Advocate Fara Williams MBE, The Prince joined a creative production workshop to hear about how the organisation has helped young people from Young Creators UK gain confidence and learn new skills.
The Homewards Fund has also enabled Spiral Skills to expand its ‘Changemaker’ programme. Changemakers are young people with lived experience of homelessness, who have themselves benefited from Spiral Skills’ intervention. Now trained as youth workers, they deliver frontline outreach across estates, schools and local hangouts – meeting young people where they are and building trust in ways that other services often cannot. The Prince sat down with two community Changemakers from Spiral Skills to hear about how they deliver street-level outreach for those who may be at risk of educational exclusion or facing complex challenges.
Abdoul, one of the Spiral Skills Changemakers, commented: ‘Working together creates the best outcome for young people. As Changemakers, we are essentially bridging the gap between young people and those who can help them further. I see it as my responsibility to connect the dots. Working with Spiral and Homewards, it’s like being part of a village, a collective effort of support.’
In 2023–2024, young people aged 16–24 represented nearly one in five (19%) of all those assessed as homeless or at risk of homelessness in Lambeth. By equipping young people with the tools to intervene early, Spiral Skills is helping to break cycles of exclusion and create pathways into employment, education and training.
Joel Balkwill, CEO of Spiral Skills, said: ‘We were thrilled to receive the support of the Homewards Fund, which has been vital to enabling us to launch our support and skills development space. Our track record delivering frontline services is well documented, but finding funders brave enough to support new ideas was nearly impossible. Together with Homewards Lambeth, we are transforming access to opportunity for our most underserved young people.’
Homewards is working in six flagship locations across the UK, including Lambeth, each receiving £500,000 of seed funding to unlock scalable and transformative solutions to end homelessness. The programme’s preventative approach recognises that supporting young people into education, employment and training is key to reducing risk.
By investing in lived experience, local leadership and collaborative models of support, Homewards is demonstrating that it is possible to end homelessness – making it rare, brief and unrepeated.
