Launching Groundwork UK with Bukhman Philanthropies: A £4M Commitment to Help Young People Thrive in an AI-Shaped World

For all the ways the world changes, so much about adolescence remains timeless. The desire to belong, to become more independent, to discover who you are and to imagine the person you might become, these are deeply human experiences.

But this generation is navigating something genuinely new: growing up in a world increasingly shaped by AI. It's beginning to shape how young people learn, create, build relationships, seek help and make sense of themselves, including how they understand and care for their mental health. The questions this raises for parents, caregivers, and educators are universal: How do we help them develop confidence in their own judgment? How do we protect space for curiosity, creativity and meaningful connection? How do we ensure that technology expands their agency rather than diminishes it?

But young people do not experience adolescence, or technology, in a vacuum. Their lives are shaped by culture, community, family, friends, education and the institutions around them. The underlying human needs may be shared, but how we support young people as they navigate AI must be rooted in place. We have to understand what young people are experiencing in their own words and support the people and organisations who know them best.

That belief is at the heart of our next chapter. Today, Young Futures and Bukhman Philanthropies are launching Groundwork UK, a £4M multiyear pilot that will listen to young people, invest in UK organisations and turn what we learn into wider support for young people growing up in an AI-shaped world.

Why the UK, and why now

The UK has a remarkable network of charities working alongside young people, deep expertise in youth mental health and well-being, and an active public conversation—across government and communities—about how to respond to rapid technological change.

Daria Bukhman comes to this work with a deep commitment to young people’s mental health and well-being—and a clear sense of urgency about what the rise of AI means for them now. Through Bukhman Philanthropies, she has built a substantial portfolio of grantmaking spanning youth mental health, research and support for the charities closest to children and families. Earlier this week, Bukhman Philanthropies announced a further $10 million portfolio of investments focused on understanding how AI affects youth mental health and how it can be made safer.

Groundwork UK is part of that wider commitment: an investment in understanding what young people are experiencing now, strengthening the organisations responding alongside them and acting while there is still an opportunity to shape what comes next. Daria’s urgency to meet this moment—and our shared conviction that young people should help shape the response—has brought us together.

Much of the conversation about young people and AI is understandably focused on immediate risks: privacy, cheating, inappropriate content, sycophantic responses and young people turning to chatbots for mental health support. These concerns are real and urgent. But preventing harm is not the same as helping young people thrive.

As we shared last week, safety matters, but it is only the floor. Supporting young people’s mental health means responding when they are struggling, but it also means helping them develop the relationships, confidence and resilience that protect their well-being over time, and set them up for success in adulthood. Young people need opportunities to strengthen the human capacities that will help them navigate whatever comes next: judgment, agency, curiosity, creativity, connection and critical thinking.

Together, these capacities underpin something especially important as AI reshapes how young people encounter knowledge and ideas: the ability to learn how to learn, to ask good questions, stay with difficult problems, change their minds when the evidence demands it and emerge with ideas that are truly their own.

Beginning with young people

We won’t learn how to do this by arriving with a ready-made programme. Young people need to help lead the way.

Groundwork UK will begin with research, a Youth Listening Tour and conversations with charities, researchers, educators and funders. We want to understand how young people across the UK are experiencing this moment, what they believe they need and where they see possibilities adults may be overlooking.

Crucially, this work will happen before we begin any grantmaking. By the time a charity reads a call for proposals, a funder has already defined the problem, described the work it hopes to find and decided what it will recognise as promising. If young people and the organisations closest to them enter only at that point, we have missed the opportunity for their knowledge to shape those choices.

What we learn during this first phase will influence the needs the funding challenge addresses and the work it supports. Listening should not be a consultation exercise that ends in a report. It should shape action, investment and how the programme develops.

We are particularly interested in youth-led and co-designed work that gives young people a meaningful role in identifying problems, developing responses and evaluating whether those responses are working. This is not about expecting young people to solve structural challenges on their own. It is about treating their lived experience as a form of expertise and giving it real weight alongside research, professional practice and institutional knowledge.

Turning listening into investment, and learning into action

The listening and research phase will lead to an open funding challenge and the selection of an inaugural cohort of UK organisations.

We expect the work to take different forms. Organisations might help young people understand AI systems and think critically about their outputs; create space for curiosity, creativity, relationships and sustained effort; or build the resilience and confidence young people need to navigate change without losing their sense of agency.

Participating organisations will receive two-year grants and join the Young Futures Academy, with access to leadership development, fundraising and communications support, subject-matter expertise and a trusted community of peers.

Our goal is to strengthen not only individual programmes, but also the organisations and leaders behind them. UK leaders will join a wider Young Futures community spanning four countries, creating opportunities to compare what they are seeing, learn across different systems and adapt promising approaches to their own contexts.

What we learn should travel beyond the organisations we fund. We will work with young people and participating charities to translate their insights into practical resources for families, educators, funders and others supporting young people. That might include research, tools, frameworks and guidance—but also clearer, more nuanced stories about how AI is affecting young people’s lives and what meaningful support can look like in practice.

This is not about extracting lessons from communities and packaging them elsewhere. It is about making the knowledge developed through the programme useful and accessible, while keeping it grounded in the experiences and cultural contexts from which it emerged.

Together, these elements will create an ongoing feedback loop: young people’s experiences shape the programme; organisations turn those insights into action; and what they learn informs wider practice, future funding and the support available to young people.

Why Groundwork UK matters

Groundwork UK brings together Bukhman Philanthropies’ commitment to the mental health and well-being of children and young adults with Young Futures’ field-building approach—combining research, grantmaking, leadership development, storytelling and the cultivation of a connected community. The programme will be led by a UK-based team, supported by the full Young Futures team in the United States.

The work will be rooted in the experiences of young people and organisations in the UK, but it will not operate in isolation. Participating leaders will join a growing international community of Young Futures Innovators expected to span four countries and include more than 70 organisations by the end of 2026.

That community creates something no single programme or country could build alone: a way to see what young people’s experiences have in common, where cultural and institutional contexts make them different, and how promising approaches might be adapted rather than simply replicated. YF Innovators can challenge one another’s assumptions, share what they are learning in real time and bring new perspectives to questions everyone is still working to understand.

The exchange will flow in both directions. UK organisations will be able to draw on the experience of peers elsewhere, while their knowledge will shape the wider Young Futures community and our collective understanding of what young people need in an AI-shaped world. Our experience building and supporting this international community gives us a foundation to draw from, but not a model to import unchanged.

Our partnership is grounded in a shared belief that charities need more than grants to expand their impact. They also need strong organisations, access to expertise and trusted peers facing related questions. Bukhman Philanthropies’ catalytic investment gives Groundwork UK the foundation to bring those elements together and begin now. As the programme develops, we will invite other UK and international funders to contribute capital, expertise and relationships—expanding the support available to organisations and the possibilities for young people.

Details of the inaugural funding challenge will follow, with applications opening in spring 2027. Before then, our work is to listen, to young people navigating these changes in real time, to charities already responding in their communities and to researchers building the evidence base.

Together with Bukhman Philanthropies, we will turn that learning into grants, stronger organisations, practical resources and an international community committed to helping young people think critically, remain curious, keep learning and shape their own futures.