YEAR HERE IS FREE
Year Here is totally unlike other postgraduate courses. Rather than spending a year in a lecture hall and paying £10,000 for the privilege, we challenge you to learn by doing – working on real social impact projects. Our partners pay us to be involved and that covers your tuition fee.
This approach to learning is more accessible than traditional higher education and, we believe, more powerful than traditional ‘chalk and talk’ approaches.
While there may be no tuition fee, a year without a salary is undeniably tough.
The good news is that there are lots of options to make your participation in the programme viable. Although the course is intensive, the majority of Fellows do freelance or part-time work in their evenings, weekends and holidays – as designers, tutors or journalists, for example. Some take out loans or receive a bursary to pay their living expenses, and some benefit from cheap accommodation options.
FUNDING
An alternative approach to traditional student loans that some Fellows pursue is to join our partners EdAid, a crowdfunding platform offering interest-free loans. You raise money from family and friends, then start paying back 10% of your income once you’ve started earning. Year Here will match fund the first £1,000 that you raise on the platform.
We also offer a small number of bursaries of up to £5,000 each year. These are funded by donations from our advisors, faculty members, and wider network. To be awarded a bursary, you will need to submit evidence of any means-tested financial assistance you have received in the past.
PART-TIME WORK
Most Fellows work alongside the programme. We can introduce you to tutoring agencies and point you in the direction of other great opportunities to make a side income. We also occasionally offer our Fellows ad hoc paid work – as photographers, writers and designers to help us recruit the next generation of Fellows.
ACCOMMODATION
There are also cheap housing options, subject to availability, that we may be able help you secure:
Reduced rate accommodation through our connection with Dot Dot Dot Property Guardians at £50-£75 per week. Fellows stay in a home that would otherwise be empty at heavily subsidised rent. Flats are often unfurnished and in need of a lick of paint. You can read more about being a property guardian on Dot Dot Dot’s website.
Introductions to other low cost housing providers like Room for Tea, where monthly rent, including bills, can be under £500.
The availability of these options varies, so we can’t guarantee that we can help everyone – but we do make every effort to.
KEEPING COSTS DOWN
Your daily travel costs will be covered during the frontline placement and consulting project phase – plus you’ll benefit from 30% of public transport costs in your own time too, thanks to our partnership with Transport for London. Your lunch costs will be covered during the frontline placement.
APPLYING FOR FINANCIAL SUPPORT
If you’re interested in applying for means-tested financial support, let us know in your application form. If you are then successful in being invited to interview, you’ll be asked to complete a means-tested financial support application form by the time you attend your selection workshop.
We decide who receives bursaries based on two factors: financial need and likelihood to benefit from the course.
Read more in our Financial Support Factsheet.
