John Lyon's charity Annual Report 2024 - Report - Page 33
Back in c.2010, the Charity had already articulated
its commitment to working in a way that tried to be
a wraparound for the children and young people in
its Beneficial Area. In the Home, in School and in the
Community is where all CYP will be found and the Charity
recognised that it needed to ensure support for them in
all three areas and encourage collaborative working to
mitigate against existing gaps. For the Charity, recognising
the intersectionality of ‘Home’, ‘School’ and ‘Community’
has ensured it has become an integral part of how we work.
The Charity’s Home-School-Community Strategy was
launched in April 2021. It was created specifically to respond
to the challenges being endured by our grantees as a result
of the Covid-19 pandemic, and designed to ensure that this
‘wraparound’ ethos remained front and centre of the work.
The strategy sought to support the Charity’s Beneficial
Area and the organisations in it not only with the tools and
funds to recover in the short term, but also to aid growth
and development over the coming years. As the immediate
enormity of the pandemic subsided and a ‘new normal’
slowly emerged, the Beneficial Area would, hopefully,
be aided by just such an approach.
Crucially, the Home-School-Community Strategy provided
an opportunity for the Charity to factor in two essential
elements: learning (no good programme should be without
it!) across all of the strategy’s components, and collaboration
- which is always strived for but, as everyone knows, oh so
hard. For the Charity, the Home-School-Community Strategy
was the opportunity to really concentrate on collaboration,
set within parameters that could run alongside the Charity’s
continuing day to day work. It has provided us with an
opportunity to learn and experience what working in this way
could look and feel like, an opportunity to walk alongside
those doing the delivery and take on some of the burden
of the challenges that come with it. The Home-SchoolCommunity Strategy is deliberately planned over six years
to allow proper time to confront the challenges head on and
time to try to weather them recognising that it was inevitable
that so much would look, feel and be completely different by
the end of that period.
JOHN LYON’S CHARITY ANNUAL REPORT 2024
31
