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Annual plan

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.

The ongoing challenges

Our city and county continue to face many challenges which are exacerbated by poverty. 40% of children in the city are living in poverty many of whom have at least one parent who is working. Within the county child poverty continues to hover around 10 to 20 percent. Alongside this Leicester City Council is preparing to declare itself bankrupt whilst making cuts to vital services. The county and district councils are making significant cuts to services leading to more poverty and cuts to support services.

Riots in Leicester East in the Autumn of 2022, which were seen to be linked to tensions between Muslim and Hindu communities in India, spilled over into local elections, which saw significant changes in the way local people vote and claims on all sides that parties were trying to use “race and faith” to divide communities to win votes. In the May elections, whilst nationally there was a big swing to Labour, in Leicester Labour lost 22 seats, whilst Conservatives won 17 seats

The local economy and business sector are struggling. 80% of businesses in Leicester are SME’s and have been hit hard by Brexit, Covid-19 lockdown and energy price increases. Many are struggling to survive and talk about challenges in recruiting and retaining employees, hold-ups in supply chains and increases in production costs pushing them to the brink.

Focus of our work

We will continue to broker partnerships between business, schools, community groups and public sector so we are able to create meaningful changes for children and young people and communities.

Children and Young People

We will continue to support young people to deal with the challenges they face. We anticipate that the next few years will continue to be “tough,” with high levels of poverty, continued cuts in services and less funding locally for the community sector. As poverty rises and services reduce, young people are more at risk of being exploited by and recruited into criminal gangs.

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 continue to run neighbourhood-based youth work in both the city and county, and continue to partner with schools and business volunteers who can support young people to develop soft and hard employability skills through a wide range of employability sessions 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, both in the community and in schools.
  • 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 feed 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.

Community development

We will build on our strong relationships with local authorities and community groups across LLR so our work is firmly anchored in 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.
  • 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

As we enter 24/25, we have identified the following priorities.

  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 deliver a high profile #PowerToChange conference in Autumn 2024.
  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 support sector managers and Heads of Programmes to develop their fundraising skills. We will work with relevant coalitions and partnerships, to win funding as we have done through the Reaching People coalition in a successful UKSPF bid.
  3. Teamwork. To work in a creative, agile and joined up way where all staff are encouraged and supported to participate in the development of our programmes and projects. Managers will seek to ensure all staff are supported and given opportunities to grow in their roles through consistent, ongoing and recorded performance management. We will revisit and 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 and Inclusion and working in an environmentally friendly way.

Conclusion

It is likely that high levels of poverty will remain across our city and county in the coming year. 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 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.

We believe our power to change approach can inspire people to work together and in doing so turn despair into hope, and strategic action for long term change.

#TogetherWeCan

Kieran Breen, CEO Leicestershire Cares

June 2024