Today the Evening Standard and The Independent launch Skill Up Step Up, a joint Christmas appeal to help unemployed young people into work through sustainable jobs or apprenticeships and transform their lives.

We have received £1 million from Barclays and partnered with the Barclays LifeSkills programme to provide grant funding over two years for up to five charities that will upskill disadvantaged jobless youths by giving them employability training.

Our first charity beneficiary is Springboard, a UK-wide group based in east London that makes jobless people “work ready” and has an outstanding track record of finding them positions in the hospitality industry. Springboard’s chief executive Chris Gamm called our appeal a “game changer” that would jump-start young people’s careers and help London’s under-staffed hotels and restaurants return to full capacity.

CS Venkatakrishnan, group chief executive at Barclays, said it would be “transformative for young lives” and he was proud to back our appeal.

Our appeal is threefold: it is a call to unemployed youth to sign up for free employability training from one of our charity partners; it is for employers, large or small, to step up to the plate and offer these young people made “work ready” a job or an apprenticeship; and it is a call to readers to donate what they can so we can support even more disadvantaged youth into jobs.

Have a read of the full article here and a letter from Evgeny Lebedev's to London or catch up on The Leader podcast.