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Annual plan

Connection, Collaboration, Creativity and Change

Leicestershire Cares’ Annual Plan 2025-26

Below is a summary of Leicestershire Cares' annual plan for 2024-25. You can read the full plan here.

Leicestershire Cares is a vibrant, result-orientated, award-winning charity that has been operating successfully across Leicester city, Leicestershire and Rutland (LLR) since 2003. We are a creative, agile and resilient organisation that delivers change for young people and communities through our joined-up approach to work that is rooted in our vision, mission and values.

Our young people and staff want to build a youth focussed coalition of change across public, business and community sector, which works together with young people without ego, silo or logo, in a creative and agile way , to build lasting and systemic change that so young people can thrive”

Kieran Breen CEO Leicestershire Cares

The ongoing challenges

Our city and county continue to face many challenges which are exacerbated by poverty. Research shows 43% of children in the city are living in poverty and many of these have at least one parent who is working. Within the county child poverty continues to hover around 10 to 20 percent, depending on the location. Both the city and county council are continuing to make cuts as they struggle against going bankrupt and local election have seen Reform take on the leadership of the County Council. There is also ongoing discussion about how the councils should be structured and a strong possibility the district councils will be merged into the city and county council. All of which leads to uncertainty, which can make services inward looking. From a young person’s or community groups perspective it also means it is harder to access support and there is increased demand for voluntary sector support, who themselves face funding cuts.

In addition to these social issues and political challenges, the local economy and business sector is struggling.80% of businesses in Leicester are SME’s and the knock on effects of Brexit, Covid 19 lockdown and energy price increases has hit them hard. The ongoing economic uncertainty caused by tariffs and wars exacerbate these issues. So many are struggling to survive and talk about challenges in recruiting and retaining employees, hold ups in supply chains and increases in production and employment costs pushing them to the brink.

Focus of our work

We will continue to broker partnerships between business, schools, community groups, public sector, and young people so we are able to:

Children and Young People

Support young people we work with to cope, deal with and overcome the complex and interrelated challenges and issues they face. We anticipate that the next few years will continue to be “tough,” with high levels of poverty across the city and county, continued cuts in services and less funding locally for the community sector. As poverty rises and services reduce, it also makes vulnerable young people, more at risk of being exploited by and recruited into criminal gangs.

We will offer a range of one to one and group interventions that will be delivered across the city and county. We will build on and add to our youth and community partnerships based in local neighbourhoods alongside the city and county wide issue-based work we deliver. We will continue to partner with schools and link them with business volunteers who can support young people to develop soft and hard employability skills. We will use creative arts as a method to empower young people to identify issues of concern, to find their voice and develop soft and hard skills. We will create more opportunities for business volunteers to support young people and community groups.

We will prioritise working with care experienced, NEET, homeless, SEND and young people involved in or at risk of being involved in the youth justice system. We will also run neighbourhood based youth work in both the city and county. We will also run a wide range of employability sessions with business partners in schools across the city and county. The emphasis of this work will be framed by our “Power to Change” approach and will:

  • Support young people to deal with the many overlapping issues that hold them back in life such as inadequate housing, physical and mental wellbeing, financial management, dependency issues, dysfunctional and abusive relationships.
  • Support young people to understand, explore, and enter education, employment, and training.
  • Enable local business community to share skills, knowledge, and resources.
  • Ensure young people’s lived experience and voice guides the development, delivery and evaluation of our work and feeds into relevant local and national policy and practice debates. We would seek to do this in a creative way, using arts based approaches as appropriate.
  • Develop youth forums that have young people, business, community, and public sector participating in them, so they can jointly discuss and plan how to tackle key issue

Community development

We will build on our strong relationships with public sector and community groups across LLR to ensure our work is firmly anchored in place based local agendas. Our work will:

  • Proactively build on the partnerships we have developed with diverse community groups and seek to develop more ways to enable the business community to partner with them to share skills and knowledge.
  • Proactively support neighbourhood youth work initiatives, where business, community, and public sector work in partnership to support young people especially those who are vulnerable and at risk.
  • Through our #PowerToChange partners forum provide a platform where local community groups can come together to share, reflect, learn, and influence local policy and decision making and seek to include young people, public sector, and business partners in this.
  • Identify and facilitate practical ways the community, business and public sector can work together to strengthen community responses to poverty and exclusions.
  • Create more opportunities for the business sector to contribute to local community development.
  • Support initiatives that seek to promote understanding between the diverse communities of our city and county.
  • Reflect on learning arising from our work and promote partnership working between business, community, and public sector through a variety of formats

Priorities

Our work will be shaped by the fact that we have successfully won three years funding from Esmee Fairbairn and The National Lottery Community Fund. Both bids seek to build on our Power to Change model and will put increased emphasis on our staff enabling and encouraging systemic joined up working between young people, community, public and business sector.

As we enter 24/25, we have identified the following:

1.Programme delivery. We will continue to deliver high quality, high impact, high profile programmes where all our work is planned, monitored, and evaluated within a Results Based Management framework. We will ensure all internal and external donor targets, milestones, budget, and reporting deadlines are met. We will continue to improve our ability to capture both “hard” and “soft” data arising from our work and create an embedded reflection and learning work culture. We will ensure we share our learning to relevant local, regional, and national audiences. We will seek to develop our capacity to use “Arts” based approaches to support young people and community partners finding and sharing their “voice.” We will establish youth forums that enable young people, public, community and business sector participants to jointly identify and plan how to tackle key issues.

2.Income. We will continue to proactively seek sustainable income streams which add value to our vision, mission, and values. We are keen to seek and win core funding alongside project funding. This will involve all our programme workers but especially managers becoming more aware of the “funding ecosystem” for their work and being able to highlight opportunities that we might be able to pursue in order to continue and or develop/expand our work. We will also hold a fundraising gala in November and explore other ways we might raise “unrestricted” funding. We will also proactively seek to build relationships with the NHS/ICB with a view to winning social prescribing funding.

3.Team work. We will aim to work in a creative, agile, and joined up manner where all staff are encouraged and supported to proactively participate in the development of our programmes and projects. Managers will proactively seek to ensure all staff are supported and given opportunities to grow and develop in their roles through consistent, ongoing, and recorded performance management. We will revisit and amend or create as required systems and structures that enable us to work in a consistent way, where all staff feel valued, safe, and supported.

4.Business partners. We will partner with local businesses to develop new opportunities for business volunteers to engage with young people and community groups. This will include remote as well as face to face volunteering. We will explore more ways that business volunteers can mentor young people and community leaders. We will seek to recruit new business members. We will improve how we communicate with the business community, so they are better able to understand and support our work.

5.Mainstreaming issues. Across all areas of our practice, we will seek to mainstream Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and working in an environmentally friendly way.

6.Team Structure. We will review how our team is structured and if required implement changes. We anticipate new structures would be fully operational from July 2026.

Conclusion

It is likely that high levels of poverty will remain across our city and county in the coming year. This is likely to be accompanied by ongoing uncertainty in local government due to “cuts” and “restructure,” which may well see less services for those in need. This in turn will generate a complex web of issues and challenges for young people and communities.

Our Power to Change approach has the potential to bring young people, communities, schools, business, and public sector together to understand and tackle these issues. Rather than seeing young people and communities as victims or problems, we see them as assets and solutions who can create rather than just consume ideas and policies.

So, we will continue to encourage organisations to connect and collaborate and to work together in creative and agile partnerships, to bring about both individual and long term systemic change.

#TogetherWeCan

Kieran Breen, CEO Leicestershire Cares

June 2025