The Children’s Community Network is made up of sites located in Smallshaw-Hurst (Greater Manchester), Wallsend (North Tyneside) and Pembury (Hackney). Our communities are made up of key people and services in children and young people’s lives, including schools, health services, housing groups and other community organisations. We work together on coordinated plans to address inequalities to ensure children and young people reach their full potential.

Our vision is to empower every child, young person and family, regardless of location, to fulfil their full potential. We do this by collectively addressing the causes, rather than the symptoms, of poverty. This means working together with everyone impacting children and young people’s lives to transform structures, policies, relationships and attitudes that will enable equal opportunities.

We understand that integrated, holistic support across children’s lives is vital for them to flourish. In disadvantaged neighbourhoods, children can face multiple and overlapping social challenges and traditional policy efforts have struggled to narrow learning and development gaps between rich and poor children.  Children’s Communities address local contexts, harness the power of local networks and create sustainable plans for transforming children’s futures.

Everything that the Children’s Community Network does, from networking and fundraising to research and the pooling of resources, is focused on building community capacity to address inequality’s root causes and enhance the lives of children, young people and families.

The impact of our work is centred around three key themes:

• Connecting organisations. We foster collaboration between services, community groups and other organisations that more widely benefits children and the community.
• Sharing learnings. We know the value of evidence-informed initiatives that truly make a difference to children and young people, that’s why we seek to share our learnings far and wide to nurture change on a wider scale
• Empowering people. We facilitate activity that creates empowered, resilient and confident children and communities. 

We need to cut out duplication and align our efforts at a local level to have the biggest impact on generations to come. It's more important than ever to maximum value from every pound invested in local neighbourhoods so that children get the support they need.