Children Heard and Seen

We know how many Labradors are registered in the UK, but not the number of children with a parent in prison. There is currently no statutory framework in place designed to support, or even identify, these children.

Children Heard and Seen was established in response to the lack of support available to children impacted by parental imprisonment. These children are at a much greater risk of experiencing mental health problems, a failure to achieve in educational settings, alongside an increased likelihood of committing criminal offences.

We have recently set up an innovative project in partnership with the Thames Valley Police to support children after they have been identified when their parent is sent to prison. For the first time ever, we are able to identify these vulnerable individuals, enabling us to offer our specialised package of support.

Our mission is to create lasting change for children and their families, and break the cycle of intergenerational offending.

Support needed:

• Influencing Public Policy: We would like support and insight from Awards Partners into how to effectively target and reach key-policy makers with our message. Our aim as an organisation is not to expand nationally, but to implement parental imprisonment into UK law. We would like there to be a national statutory mechanism to identify and support children with a parent in prison. This could be through the school’s admissions process, enabling children with a parent in prison to be eligible for Pupil Premium.
• Impact Measurement: We know that our interventions work. Nationally speaking, 65% of boys with a parent in prison go on to offend. Of the 865+ children we have supported since inception, only four have gone on to commit an offence, a reduction to just 0.5%. We would like support implementing an effective system of impact measurement to demonstrate the value of our work, specifically in improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health outcomes of the children we work with.
• Programme Support and Involvement: We would like Awards Partners that share the same desire to help young people to get involved with our programme. This could be by giving a talk to young people, or offering learning and creative opportunities to inspire and motivate them to reach their potential.
• Technology Consultancy: We would appreciate support from a technology consultant to help develop our website. Furthermore, we are always keen to amplify the voices of children impacted by parental imprisonment, whilst keeping their identities anonymous. We would like support in pursuing this aim, potentially through the production of animations or other media.

https://childrenheardandseen.co.uk/

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Dementia Support - Night Breaks

Dementia is a terminal condition and has a devastating impact, often causing difficulties completing simple tasks or maintaining relationships. The whole family is impacted as they watch their loved one decline and lose their independence. In the UK there are an estimated 944,000 people living with dementia in the UK, it is the leading cause of death and there is no cure.

Dementia Support is an innovative young charity that is on a mission to expand it’s impact on a national scale. Sage House, our unique dementia hub, is the first of it’s kind in the UK. Through the Stephen Lloyd Awards, we are looking for support that will help us to realise our national vision. Our approach focuses on joining up services, working in collaboration, and making it easy for people to navigate the support they need. Our project- Night Breaks will be unique and a model of care not provided anywhere else in the UK.

Support needed:

• Scaling Social Reforms: expertise that will help us develop the business model that will support the replication of our dementia hub in other communities. This could include social franchising or other models of expansion.
• Social Financing: developing a sustainable funding model for supporting the development of our national ambitions program such as social investment, franchising models, finance options and seed funding for new hubs.
• Charity Incorporation:developing our approach to outcome measurement to create a framework that works for the complexity of dementia. We want to become more effective in demonstrating the difference we are making on an ongoing basis.
• Influencing and Networking: we have a strong network of local partners but need to grow our reach and expand this to people with national influence. We are looking for people who can help us develop our influencing strategy and introduce us to key individuals on a national scale.

https://www.dementiasupport.org.uk/

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Emotion Dysregulation in Autism

Autistic individuals are 28-times more likely to experience suicidality, and there is a 9-fold increase in death by suicide amongst autistic adults. Fifty-eight percent of current mental health inpatient hospital admissions represent autistics; 1 in 7 are under the age of 18. There is a clear gap in support provision for autistic young people leaving the psychiatric inpatient system. This simply can not go on.

We are E-DA which stands for Emotion Dysregulation in Autism, an organisation committed to supporting the unique needs of young individuals facing this complex challenge. We promise to nurture young people’s strengths, and guide them towards a brighter future through our peer support service, by embedding lived experience into their care.

We want to address this urgent treatment gap by delivering psychologically informed peer support to autistic young people leaving the psychiatric inpatient system. This will help them to reduce their self-harm and suicide risk, as well as empower both the peer and young person. We are looking to fund 5 peer support workers over the next year as part of our pilot project. This pilot programme will seek to help a small group of young people, enabling them to reintegrate back into education or work, empowering them to reengage with society after psychiatric admission.

The funding from the Awards will help us in our mission to prevent suicides within autistic young people. We aim to equip them with the skills to withstand adversity and manage distress. Yet, most importantly, we will offer them something they yearn for—genuine understanding and companionship.

Support needed:

• PR & Comms: to support our fundraising initiative to cover core costs and our peer support programme. This will help us with our policy work, where we hope to create a law in parliament to ensure that autistic young people are protected on psychiatric wards.
• Professional Development and Mentoring: career development and skills building opportunities for our young people, with one example including company “Takeover Day” where young people shadow lawyers, HR staff, CEOs etc.This will empower young people and inspire them to continue the future generation of young leaders, enabling their personal development.
• Marketing: to promote our peer support campaign and the brilliant work we do around embedding youth voice into meaningful change.
• Strategic Support: invaluable organisational strategy support from other CEOs and charities, particularly around scaling and long term sustainability.
• Legal Governance: to help with trademarking our charity logo and slogan and our terms and conditions. Essential policies would be helpful to ensure our governance is good enough for NHS England partnerships.
• Accountancy: to ensure we have a full annual accounts prepared for the charity commission in November, and help with essential book keeping.
• Fundraising and Investment: we need to raise funds for our peer support programme and would love to engage with corporate partners to do fundraising challenges, with the view to funding the work that we hope to carry out, in this way, transforming the lives of countless autistic young people with a mental health need.
• SEO Support and Tech: to be able to broaden our online presence and get our mental health and autism revolution to be easily accessible to members of the public when they search us up on search engines.

https://www.emotiondysregautism.org/

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Family Volunteering Club

Volunteering rates in the UK are at an historic low, yet we are facing some of society’s biggest challenges. We need to remove barriers to enable communities who are not able, to engage with civic participation and help solve some of these, on a local and national scale. One such group is families.

Family Volunteering Club creates inclusive, flexible, fun and impactful volunteering programmes specifically designed for children aged 0 – 9 and their grown ups. We are introducing children in an age-appropriate way to issues from food poverty and homelessness, to the cost of living crisis and climate change, inspiring a new generation of changemakers and empowering them to understand the important role they can play in community. We are also enabling adults with caring responsibilities to easily contribute to their community, utilising their untapped skills and ideas for positive societal change, whilst supporting their mental and physical wellbeing.

Currently established in south London, we are on a journey to have national reach to enable thousands of families in towns, cities and villages across the UK every week, to participate positively in local community life.

Support needed:

• Legal and Governance: We are in the process of appointing a founding Board of Trustees and beginning the process to register as a CIO. We would appreciate support with the CIO application process, advice on governance and ensuring strong foundations for the new CIO, plus support with a Trademark application.
• Scaling Up: As we grow to new locations across the UK, we are working on a sustainable model for growth. We would appreciate support in helping us develop a new ‘community franchise’ model which is entirely led by the local community, whilst being replicable at scale.
• Fundraising: We know the hugely positive impact that this project could have on families and local communities across the UK, and would appreciate support in finding further investors, funders, sponsors and other methods of income generation to help us realise our ambition.
• Impact Measurement: We wish to start embedding a longer term measurement framework into the programme, so we understand in greater depth the impact of our programme on both the children and the adults who participate, and how this can help inform sector-wide research, and would appreciate support in this area.
• Leadership and Mentoring: This project was created by Maddy Mills, and has grown from a seed of an idea that she had, to now being on a journey to become a charity with national reach, and as such Maddy would appreciate a mentor to support through the next exciting stage of this journey.

https://www.familyvolunteeringclub.co.uk/

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The Haven Wolverhampton - NOAH Project

The Haven Wolverhampton is a specialist domestic abuse organisation supporting women and children in emergency accommodation, in their own homes, and through digital early intervention.

Home can be a terrifying place to be for victims of domestic abuse, but children have told us they didn’t realise the abuse wasn’t normal until support services were involved. They felt most at risk, helpless, confused, and lonely before their mum asked for help.

With children involved every step of the way, we have developed NOAH (Not Ok at Home), an interactive game to help children to identify what is going on at home, keep safe, and get help, but it needs more development.

Funding for NOAH will enable us to continue our collaborative approach with children and our technology partner for the next phase of its development ready for launch, so it can support countless children who are victims of domestic abuse, when they are most isolated and afraid.

Support needed:

• Impact Measurement: Our primary objective will always be to keep children safe. We need help to scope safe ways of measuring the impact of the game without this in any way compromising the anonymity or safety of the children who use it.
• Funding for Growth & Scaling: Once we have completed the next phase of NOAH game development, we want to explore the development of a toolkit with professionals who work directly with young people (e.g. teachers, youth workers) so they have the resources they need to deliver NOAH based sessions in their settings. This could help widen NOAH’s reach and impact but we will need additional funding support to achieve this.
• Marketing and Communication: For NOAH to have the impact we know it can have, it needs to reach children far and wide. We would be hugely grateful for support to raise awareness of NOAH nationally to ensure children hear about it and want to play it.

https://www.havenrefuge.org.uk/

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Release Mates

Reoffending rates in the UK are amongst the highest in Europe. Most prison leavers do not wish to reoffend, yet recent figures from the National Audit Office show that over 2 in 5 of the 58,000 people who leave prison every year in England and Wales, go on to reoffend within a year of their release. The cost of this is £16.7 billion per year. Release Mates is a group of prison leavers who recognise, from their own lived experience, the difficulties facing those embroiled in the criminal justice system. The organisation is made up of volunteers who have left prison and are in recovery from addiction living a pro-social lifestyle.

The team focuses on diffusing day of release anxiety for prison leavers, offering practical support with accommodation, drug and alcohol recovery, probation appointments, and more, whilst most importantly providing hope and belief that rehabilitation is achievable.

Support needed:

• Governance:  we seek to build a board of directors who can offer support with the implementation of policies, strategies, safeguarding, risk management.
• Impact Measurement: the success of our project is contingent upon successful outcomes. We would like support in how we can best measure this in line with data protection laws.
• Growth: our model is proven to work on a small scale, and we believe it can be replicated in each probation region of England and Wales. We would like to work with someone who can advise us on how best to achieve this.
• Mentoring: In many areas of social enterprise, we are naïve and lack confidence. We seek the guidance of a mentor to build our confidence in making the right decisions.
• Progression: presently our team is made up entirely of volunteers. It is unrealistic for the people who make the project work to continue to do so without pay. Whilst we wish to use the volunteer model to a large extent, we seek help in how to progress established members of the team into paid roles and how to find funding for this.
• PR & Media: we work in a sector which attracts publicity and would greatly benefit from working with someone who can show us how best to use this publicity to grow the organisation and exhibit our values and beliefs.
• Improving the Service: the cohort of society we work with has experienced trauma and/or mental ill-health. To be of better service to our beneficiaries, we would dearly like to work with someone to improve our knowledge and understanding of trauma and mental health first aid.
• Accountancy: financial matters are complicated for us. Advice from a person experienced in this area can help us immeasurably.

https://www.releasemates.org/

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SoftCycle

Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of textile waste go to landfills every year, and that’s just in the UK. Treated as a dirty secret, our unwanted clothes are often sent abroad, forming textile mountains all over the world.

At SoftCycle, we are turning waste textiles into a highly valued raw material with minimal processing. This material is then used as stuffing in the furniture industry, replacing traditional oil-based foam and polyester.

The SoftCycle recycling facility will collect, sort and shred domestic and commercial waste textiles. Supplying both big industry names and local makers with a unique and valuable product, this venture will create jobs and spur innovation in the soft furnishings industry.

SoftCycle is a highly scalable solution that will change the current waste system and effectively divert textiles from landfill.

Support needed:

• Fundraising and Investment: This is an ambitious project and we will be looking to source investment and explore partnership opportunities.
• Business Development: We need to refine our business model to ensure we can effectively manage supply and demand. We’ll need support to create processes, build the right team and gain the right partnerships so that we can scale.
• Product Development: Prior to production, we need to invest in research and development of the initial SoftCycle stuffing products, and will require support bringing it to market.
• Legal and Regulatory: Advice will be needed to help us navigate industry regulations and legal requirements.
• Impact Measurement: We need to create and embed an impact measurement strategy which will allow us to accurately understand and measure the impact of the SoftCycle product.

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Suicide&Co - Sidekick

Suicide&Co launched in July 2020 as the only national charity focusing on professional support for people bereaved by suicide. Our core service is our Counselling Service which has received over 1070 applications with minimal awareness, meaning from day one we’ve been innovative about providing support via our Digital Services on our website.

On average 34,000 people are directly bereaved by suicide each year and over 700,000 are affected. They are also a high risk audience as they are 65% more likely to attempt suicide themselves, than if their loved-one died by natural causes (UCL report).

It is imperative that we reach more people who are affected with support that will be effective. Our Digital Services on our website are the start to resolving this issue but they can be transformed through the implementation of new technology via an app allowing for personalised service delivery.

Support needed:

• UX and Feature Development: We need to further develop the app features that enable personalisation, making surfacing the personalised resources more efficient. We need to build our 6-Month Screener that allows all newly bereaved individuals to be signposted to their Government funded local service. As well as making iterations to the app after our User Research results.
• Back-end Development:We need to develop the back end CMS system so that Suicide&Co staff can easily upload new resources as we produce 8-10 a month and want up-to-date information for highly engaged users is key.
• Scaling & GTM Advice: We would hugely benefit from working with the relevant advisors within the Awards Partners to gain more insight into scaling technology and strategic input into our go to market strategy.
• Design: The app has sidekick’s old branding and we’ve made basic adjustments so it is inline with our brand but our design agency needs to redesign it to improve UX and accessibility.
• Resource Creation: We need dedicated staff time to produce new resources that fill the gaps we have identified against various personalisation criteria, to ensure the app is the most inclusive and beneficial for all audiences.
• User Research: We’ve already conducted User Research with over 300 people, which has greatly informed the current state of our app. We would like to continue being informed by our communities needs and so when new features are created and designed we’d like to gather qualitative and quantitative data.

https://www.suicideandco.org/

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Tangent

Tangent is on a mission to close the professional network gap for millions of people by helping lower socioeconomic jobseekers (63% of the UK population) access employment opportunities which are currently out of their reach due to systemic inequalities.

You’re 9x more likely to be hired through an employee referral and 82% of employers rank referrals as their best hiring source. That’s great, if you have a professional network, but if you come from a lower socioeconomic background, you don’t have this type of network and are locked out of the most successful recruitment channel. To solve this, we combine video technology, ChatGPT and a dynamic marketplace to connect traditionally overlooked talent with employees for an employee referral.

We’ve already supported talent into unicorn companies such as Multiverse and GoCardless and are on a mission to do this for 10 million more people by the end of the decade.

Support needed:

• Brand & Marketing: support with building and designing our brand and visual identity that strongly resonates with our target audience to encourage new users. Support with leveraging social media as a channel to acquire users as well as develop relevant PR relationships to get coverage in newspapers, online articles, blogs, events etc.
• Partnerships : introductions to organisations that support young people/jobseekers from diverse/underrepresented backgrounds into good work opportunities i.e. Charities, London Boroughs, Universities
• Funding: identification of relevant grants and support with writing grant applications, as well as introductions to impact investors
• Legal Advice: support with writing a robust privacy policy, our GDPR compliance and development/protection of our Intellectual Property
• Technology: support from technical experts with building and developing our tech platform, as well as introductions to interested software developers to join us on our mission of creating a world where the social circumstances you are born into do not determine your career and life outcomes

https://www.jointangent.com/

Turn On The Subtitles (TOTS)

Turn On The Subtitles (TOTS) is a childhood literacy campaign with one main aim; to improve the literacy of all children in the UK and globally. Turning on the subtitles doubles the chances of children becoming good at reading. We will share this simple message, through a combination of targeting teachers, parents, broadcasters and government – with the ultimate aim of passing legislation for broadcasters to put subtitles on children’s TV programmes by default.

Overwhelming research shows that same language subtitles on children’s programming can as much as double literacy acquisition for children ages 6-10.

Having subtitles on children’s TV is a simple and most importantly, free intervention with nothing but positive consequences. Covid has had a devastating impact on children’s literacy in the UK, especially amongst the poorer demographic and this campaign has the ability to improve literacy levels for all children worldwide thereby enhancing their future prospects.

Support needed:

• Professionalising the communications campaign: We are a small team juggling all the elements of a successful and fast growing campaign. We are struggling to keep up with the pace at which this campaign is growing. We have celebrities and lots of other people wanting to get involved but would really appreciate guidance and support with our communications to help us with this.
• Working with JPAL on a modular extensible randomised control trial: We have a lot of research which we need to carry out but we just don’t have the bandwidth to own it. Ideally we would love someone to lead us on this if possible with their expertise.
• Help with a fundraising mentor: One of the biggest stumbling blocks for us is a lack of funds. There is no specific income stream for this campaign apart from the goodwill of individuals and organisations who have so kindly supported us so far. We know the potential for TOTS is huge but we don’t have the money to make it happen. If there is anyone who could mentor us in fundraising, it would be a great help.
• Passing UK legislation: Ultimately Turn On The Subtitles will be a success once broadcasters put the subtitles on children’s television programming by default. We know the opportunity is there, but we really need some help writing the legislation and to mentor us in navigating these unfamiliar waters.

https://turnonthesubtitles.org/

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