In partnership with:

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All about Growing Our Strengths

Action for Children,  Action for Prisoners' Families, the Family and Parenting Institute and Family Action are working together in an exciting and ambitious new project for the VCS funded by the Department For Education until March 2013.

The project is one of a number of new initiatives funded specifically to help ensure that there is a "vibrant market of effective service providers" able to work skilfully with vulnerable families by offering the right support at the earliest possible stage to prevent family problems from escalating.

Dynamic opportunities

Growing Our Strengths has a specific and unique place within this new range of projects. It provides a dynamic opportunity for Voluntary and Community sector organisations across England to get together to share our knowledge and skills, so that we can learn from each other about outcomes and best practice in early intervention services for families.

  • We believe that the Voluntary and Community sector already has a high level of expertise and knows best how to provide early intervention services
  • We also believe that we know how to show the difference our work makes to vulnerable children and families and that by combining our efforts we can demonstrate this even more effectively

We need your involvement to help make this happen: take part and help us to know, show and grow your strengths.

By participating and engaging in the process you can help us to demonstrate that you know your own strengths and place value on your work and are willing to show those strengths by sharing your skills and knowledge with other organisations.

You are also open to growing those strengths by learning and exploring new ways of working with colleagues. Right now is the time to get involved as we take the first steps on this journey towards change and to help shape its direction for the future:

Get involved!

Step 1: You can participate in our knowledge reviews by completing the initial questionnaires we will send. This way you can tell us about what already exists as your best practice examples and then talk to us in more detail about how we can share and disseminate this information

Step 2: You can help drive us towards change and improvement. Take part in "Promote and Discover Workshops" which will take place in various locations across the country to showcase your best practice, celebrate your achievements and encourage engagement in interactive dialogue and learning about what works best and why.

And that is just the start! Ultimately we hope that organisations will be able to use the resources we create to support ongoing development of our work and help us engage in more co-operative and collaborative partnerships, achieving better outcomes for children.

What will we be doing?

Our vision for the project is to ensure that by March 2013 we will have contributed significantly towards strengthening capacity across the VCS and:

  • Are better able to continue to support children and young people by providing innovative and cost effective approaches based on what we know works best
  • Have enhanced our ability to compete in a challenging market place by being much clearer about how we evidence and demonstrate the impact of our work
  • Are leading the way towards sustainable change both in how we work together as agencies and in the impact we have on families

As a lead partnership we will be engaging with a wide range of VCS organisations across England to create a network of activities and resources to which the sector can contribute and which will be of benefit to all. These will be about best practice models, service redesign, cost effectiveness and outcomes based work.

Our main activities will include:

  • Development of a VCS orientated good practice advice store
  • Knowledge reviews about effective early intervention by the Sector
  • Promote and Discover Workshops on a range of themes on offer throughout England
  • Development of performance guidance and a self assessment tool for organisations
  • Development of Outcomes Based Training modules which the sector can access and use to inform practice and service developments.

Get in touch

For more information about how to get involved with the project or to tell us about your work please email James McCarthy at Action for Children: james.mccarthy@actionforchildren.org.uk

Get involved now and help us combine our efforts so that we can grow our own
strengths to help make the biggest difference!