The YouMatter Fund is open to Black youth aged 14 to 19 across Durham Region.
See if you qualifyAkoma is the Adinkra symbol for the heart: patience, tolerance, goodwill. It is a fair name for a fund built on the belief that young people in this region are already doing the work and mostly need somebody to stop making it hard.
Durham RegionWhere every dollar has to land.
Akoma Youth Network is an Ontario incorporated non-profit built on the legacy of the Brothers United Mentorship Program. The work was always the same work: showing up for young people in Durham Region, week after week, and watching what they could do with a bit of backing.
What kept happening was the money. Young people were getting turned down for amounts they needed in small sums and needed quickly. Not because the ideas were weak, but because the applicant was sixteen, or unincorporated, or asking for three hundred dollars instead of thirty thousand.
Grant systems are built to protect money from risk. That instinct is reasonable at scale and ruinous at street level, where the risk is a few hundred dollars and the upside is a neighbourhood that works better than it did last summer. So The YouMatter Fund does the opposite. We fund early, we fund fast, and we send a mentor along with the cheque.
The question was never whether a young person can be trusted with a thousand dollars. It is why we ever decided they could not be.
We do not hold money back until you have earned it. Once the plan and budget are signed off, the grant is transferred in full, because that is when it is actually useful. If something goes sideways we would rather hear about it than police it.
$200 to $1,000 is not a rounding error to someone buying paint, booking a gym or printing a first run. Large grants come with large expectations. Small ones let a fourteen year old try something and find out.
The whole point of Akoma is to move community builders out of the queue for resources and into the seat where resources get handed out. Today's grantee is meant to be tomorrow's mentor, panellist and donor.
Every submission is read by our internal review committee and board: people who live and work in the communities the fund serves, with day jobs and a stake in how this goes.
Co-founder
One sentence on who they are and what they bring.
Co-founder
One sentence on who they are and what they bring.
Review committee
One sentence on who they are and what they bring.
Review committee
One sentence on who they are and what they bring.
Every grantee is matched to a primary mentor on skillset and domain, and backed by a wider network of volunteer professionals available for short advisory calls. Both roles are open.
Put your name forward