It's not just about fundraising, we're changing the capital too

IT'S astonishing what we take for granted. Back in early 2010, the most the Evening Standard had ever raised in a campaign was £250,000. That was considered a pretty good result back then for the paper's traditional annual Christmas drive, which typically solicited funds for a chosen charity. Today, a Standard campaign that raises anything short of £1 million can seem like a failure.

- David Cohen

The game changer was the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund, which I launched in 2010 under new proprietor Evgeny Lebedev and then editor Geordie Greig. Our exposé of inequality in London began with the heart-wrenching story of a young teenager who had been saving for months to raise the £19 fee he needed to apply to university and it resulted in dozens of £19 cheques being sent in by readers and a place opening up at a London university.

Our initial five-day series of articles included the revelation of secret mass paupers' graves for babies from impoverished families a scandal that implicated almost every London council - with our reporting hailed by Prince William as "a call to arms".

When, months later, we launched the Dispossessed Fund, setting a £1million goal, it struck such a chord with readers that we raced to that total in 20 days and went on to raise an extraordinary £4 million. Later that year I published a book, Calling London How a City's Dispossessed Found a Voice, in which I told the story of our initiative and predicted this was just the beginning of a whole new way of doing campaigns at the Standard - and, just as importantly, engaging with the underbelly of London.

Thirteen years later and many things have changed at the Standard - including six new editors and acting editors and surviving a potentially existential shock to circulation due to Covid - but one of the things that has remained constant is our commitment to bold and high-profile campaigning journalism.