Three years ago, Lara Taylor set up the Andy Taylor Foundation in memory of her late husband, the co-founder of Little Dot Studios. She talks to Louise Bateman about what the charity has achieved so far and its next steps to support young people to achieve their ambitions in the creative industries.
Three years ago, on February 10, 2022, Lara Taylor launched the Andy Taylor Foundation, in memory of her late husband who died of cancer in 2020. Andy Taylor, widely recognised within the content industry as a pioneer of the digital space and a hugely popular figure, had always wanted to support underprivileged young people to make it into the industry he loved so much.
“It was Andy’s idea that I carried forward for him when he realised he couldn’t,” explains Taylor, reflecting on the foundation she set up in his name.
“He was born in Rochdale in Greater Manchester, which historically and, sadly to some degree, still is quite a tough place in terms of opportunity and mobility. He didn’t really expect to go to university, and he didn’t expect to have the career that he had.”
Graduation day for a recent Andy Taylor Foundation cohort
The career Andy Taylor never expected to have led him to spearhead Channel 4’s launch of VoD service 4OD in 2006, before becoming commercial director at All3Media and then co-founding Little Dot Studios with his friend and All3 colleague Selma Turajlic in 2013.
“Through this interesting path, through some amazing organisations and media, he kept reflecting back on the fact that so many of his peers from home could have done just as good a job as the people around him, if not better, [but] most of them had absolutely no idea how to get into these roles.” Instead, she says, “he observed too much depends on who you know, unpaid internships, and he really thought that was wrong.”
A corporate lawyer with no previous experience of setting up charities, Taylor describes herself as “a doer” who “wants it done yesterday”, something that has led her to think sometimes, “we probably aren’t where I, personally, want us to be”, but she’s prepared to acknowledge she’s “very proud” of what’s been achieved so far and where the charity is heading. “I think we are doing exactly what [Andy] wanted, which I love.”
So, what have been the key milestones for the Andy Taylor Foundation?
The first happened three months into launch, when it announced the first crop of youngsters supported by charity, in partnership with Manchester-based social enterprise SharpFutures to help 18- to 24-year-olds break into the creative sector.
Aptly called Foot in the Door, the programme provided a 12-week course for a diverse group of young people, offering them training in skills such as confidence-building, pitching, and content creation. The participants were then placed in six-week work placements at various media companies. Throughout this time the foundation maintained ongoing relationships with them, tracking their progress and providing further support as needed.
“The outcomes have been very positive,” says Taylor, with some of the participants securing permanent roles at companies within the media industry.
A case in point is Grace Barnes. Before Foot in the Door, Barnes had given up finding a job in media, which she’d studied at college in Stockport. “She was unemployed, doing a bit of caring for her grandparents, doing a bit of home content, creating from her bedroom,” recalls Taylor. “Very talented, very creative, clever at editing.”
Following her placement in video editing at LADbible, Barnes secured a job as a junior video editor at the company. “They absolutely loved her. She absolutely loved them,” says Taylor. So good was Barnes at her job that she was kept on, despite a redundancy round at the company. She went on to be awarded Employee of the Year and has since been promoted.
“I keep going back to her and saying, do you need any help? Do you need any more mentoring? She’s just happy, loving life, got engaged, moved out [of her parent’s home], and her life is on its way up,” says Taylor, herself clearly thrilled by this outcome.
Nevertheless, not everyone on the programme had such quick success, in particular those who chose more traditional routes in film and TV. “We don’t really want to encourage [young people] to go somewhere that is freelance boom and bust, we’d love to get them all into slam dunk contract roles where they’ve got certainty of income,” says Taylor, noting the detrimental impact the cost-of-living crisis and job insecurity is having on young people.
This led to a rethink by the foundation, whose board of trustees include Turajlic, Andy’s sister Sophie Hakes, LBC radio presenter, broadcaster and podcaster, James O’Brien, and digital economy start-up entrepreneur and investor, Jason George.
“Andy was an absolute believer in digital first. He was pretty much one of the first people to notice that YouTube was the future,” says Taylor. “So, we did some strategic work in the second half of last year and decided that for future programmes we’re really going to push digital first. It speaks to our roots, it’s where the industry’s evolving, and the statistics are very clear about how media consumption is going.”
One of the outcomes of that refocus kicks off this month, when the Andy Taylor Foundation officially joins the Royal Television Society’s Digital Innovation Panel.
Applications for the bursary scheme will open “in mid-to-late February” says Taylor, and the charity will help pick the 10 to 12 digital innovation students accepted on the course. “We will physically fund two of them, but we will impact all of them,” she says, adding that the foundation will now “be part of a summer tour when [successful students] will get an incredible national experience going around seeing elements of the industry.” Among participants in the RTS Digital Innovation scheme are Apple TV, STV Group in Scotland and Little Dot Studios.
Clearly excited at this latest step in the foundation’s journey, Taylor says: “I love that [the RTS is] doing this with us because I think that the sorts of talented young people that the Royal Television Society unearth and the incredible opportunities that you get by being linked to the RTS, and our network, pushing [young people] towards the environment where I believe their futures are safer, is a really powerful combination and I’m so thrilled that we’re going to do that.”
Alongside this, and if the foundation can raise the funding, Taylor says the charity would like to run its own “impactful, long, in-depth course focusing on content creation and consumption for the digital-first world.
“That is something that if anyone is listening and they want to help us, we have the contacts, we know how to pull the thing together and would do an incredible job. And I suspect people would come out of it and get work. We would love some partners to fund it and support it because the need is there and the impact will be massive,” she cheerleads.
Like all charities, the issue of funding never goes away, and Taylor believes that the foundation, which until now has relied on raising money via “long-standing, generous personal donors” and fundraising events, is ready to take the next step into corporate funding.
“We’ve come through those early infancy stages. We’ve got annual reports and accounts and all those important regulatory pieces that you have to have. And frankly, from my perspective, we’ve proven to ourselves that we know what we’re doing, and we can make a difference. So, I feel a lot more confident now, not being from a media or charity background, that this is really impactful stuff,” she says.
Changing young lives has become a passion for Taylor over the last three years. “It’s far more fulfilling than writing yet another corporate contract,” she jokes, but she also deeply serious about the huge amount of work still to be done to help young people.
“Here, young adults from a working-class background are four times less likely to work in creative industries than a middle-class peer. It’s not fair. It needs changing,” she says. “Support us so we can do more.”
You can find out more about the Andy Taylor Foundation by clicking here.
Click here for more information on the RTS Digital Innovation bursary.
Lara Taylor is a media, tech and commercial lawyer, with a personal interest in bolstering opportunities and social mobility for young people. She now combines both elements in her work for the Andy Taylor Foundation, a charity set up in the name of her late husband, with whom she says, “she shared everything, not least our passion for this cause”.
Before founding the Andy Taylor Foundation, Taylor was director of business and legal affairs at Little Dot Studios, the fast-growing next generation media company co-founded by Andy Taylor.
Prior to that she worked as a lawyer in the financial sector, including Dow Jones and Lloyds TSB, and before that spent time as an associate at legal firms Latham & Watkins and Shaw Pittman Potts Trowbridge.
Taylor started her career as trainee lawyer at DLP Piper, where she first met her late husband. 
