We are about to enter our 10th birthday year, marking a decade of social impact and steady growth since we formally started our first Social Outcomes Partnership model in the White City community of west London in 2016. Now, as we embark on the next decade, we are defining our new 10-year ambition and making the strategic choices to enable a new way of investing in children’s futures in our communities across the nation. It has been an absolute privilege to chair AllChild for the best part of the last decade, to be part of the positive impact we are having and the change we are pioneering. I am delighted that you are interested in the role at this critical transition point for the organisation.
We started AllChild (formerly known as West London Zone for Children and Young People) inspired by the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York, as a local solution for what we thought was a local problem – to enable early identification of children falling through the cracks of a siloed system and to help them to build trusted relationships and access all the support and opportunities they need to flourish into adulthood. In short, to mobilise families, schools, council services, community organisations and other charities around children in a strengthened, joined up early action ecosystem of support and opportunity – it takes a village to raise a child. 10 years in and thousands of children have better social, emotional and academic outcomes, while families, classrooms and communities have also reaped positive benefits.
We have consistently met our ambitious growth and impact targets, and we now know our local solution can translate to different communities, adapting to be relevant in every new place. We have got deeper in West London, expanded into Greater Manchester and are now conducting extensive listening and co-design in other new places as part of our future growth plans. All the while steadily building our evidence base for children’s better outcomes and for the long-term local transformation of early support systems in communities.
The new Chair of Trustees will play a crucial role in steering the national expansion of our deeply local way of working, helping AllChild to broaden reach while deepening impact through embedding and sustaining our ways of working for long-term change in our communities. We aim to share our insights and learning in a national blueprint for local change and build a movement for a new way of investing in children’s futures, with AllChild Alumni voices at the fore. All of this will mean doubling our income through our Social Outcomes Partnership model which enables collective impact by bringing together a blend of national and local public and private funding, philanthropy and social investment in every place.
This is an exciting role at an important time for AllChild in arguably the most challenging social and economic context of our times for our country and our children, a context which demands that we change the way we support them to grow up.
If you share our ambition and energy to be at the forefront of that change, we want to hear from you.
Sir Harvey McGrath