Awards, rewards, onwards.

Although I am loathe to admit it, we are once again hurtling towards the end of another year. If 2011 was a year of change, and 2012 was a year of construction, 2013 has been a year of emergence. It's been a year when the work we put into developing The Promise Academy has started to take shape, to have an impact-and to gain recognition.

We recently headed off, as we do each September, for a full team day in Shoreham at a wonderful place called The Quadrangle Trust. Such occasions are a rare but vital opportunity to plan for the time ahead but also to take stock of what has been accomplished over the previous twelve months. It's easy to forget how far we've traveled at The Winch, in two short years.

And so this post functions primarily as an update of our progress in building the UK's first children's zone-at a time when other organisations are starting to take an increasingly active interest in what this might look like in their own locality. Our vision of supporting children from cradle to career has come on leaps and bounds, with the image below giving a snapshot of our status.

Some work has been about bridging different segments, whereas much has been about developing new elements and building our research and tech infrastructure.

We have been able to secure resource to launch or explore a number of areas this year, but at the forefront of our model lies the Promise Worker Pilot. The Promise Worker role is our best learning about what does and doesn't work in child and adolescent development, partnership working, impact measurement and traditional play and youth work rolled into one.

We appointed Zenobia Talati as Lead on the Promise Worker Pilot, with Andre Kpodonu focusing on 18 to 25s, at the end of last year-and the approach has garnered interest from all sorts of quarters. Over the next few months, the Promise Worker role will be the approach adopted by an increasing number of our frontline staff, expanding to include 4 to 11s and families. The pilot has been cited as an example of best practice in Camden and won national recognition, being shortlisted in the awards category for  'Children & Young People's Charity of The Year' by CYP Now. This is for 'a combination of innovative practice, effective partnership working or campaigning for change' that has made a contribution to 'improving the life chances of children, young people or families'.

Fatuma Osman and Gian Farci picked up awards for their Gap Scheme, with Ace United winning their 2012/13 league. How will we fare at the Children & Young People Now Awards?

I am rarely, if ever, able to complete a blog without a rallying cry-and I am afraid that this one will be no different. It is both exciting and gratifying to see how a children's zone is emerging in North Camden, to see how it is connecting and impacting more effectively on the lives of children and young people-and of course when it is recognised elsewhere. Yet it still feels very much like a work in progress, the beginning of the journey. The next twelve months will see us focus more intensively on impact measurement across the cradle to career spectrum and invest in developing early years services. We are excited about our imminent launch of the Promise Partnership Report, and working with organisations across and beyond Camden to make the zone a reality.

In this endeavour, I hope you can support us: through encouragement, through funding, through learning and introductions and support. Perhaps the most important insight we took away from Harlem was that here in London we have a latent civic infrastructure that can deliver better outcomes and improve life chances for our children. However, it will take time, resource, patience, determination and a commitment that takes precedent over individual agendas and aims. Please join us in making it happen.

Why a report on partnership working is, in fact, hugely exciting.

Last year, we commissioned a report into partnership working across our area as part of the ongoing development of a children's zone in North Camden.  Funded in part by Camden Council, the intention was to explore the barriers and opportunities to collaborating around the child poverty agenda and to explore ways forward.

Partnership working is a term that I have mixed feelings about. It promises much, but frequently delivers little. It covers all manner of set-ups, from nominal 'name-you-name-me' partnerships of convenience to highly collaborative and integrated approaches to addressing specific issues and challenges.

It is also one of the areas that our trip to Harlem Children's Zone taught us a limited amount about. HCZ and indeed the other organisations we visited were good at developing relationships with funders and supporters, be they federal or philanthropic, but as far as I was aware rarely with other federal agencies and service providers. In fact one of HCZ's distinctive features is arguably its circumvention of delivery partners, instead effectively and efficiently delivering the full range of services and support required from cradle to career, whether in education, health or community work. As I described in a previous blog, Geoffrey Canada's frustration at obstruction in Harlem schools drove the creation of their academies, the single biggest element of the HCZ pipeline. It is in the areas of fundraising and research that partnerships come to the fore.

One of our key observations about how a children's zone might work in London was that it would need to focus on and harness the extraordinary resource that already exists, rather than seeking to recreate or replicate it. Both the geographical shape and the welfare infrastructure in our context require a more intelligent approach, and professionals working with children and young people from every background will pay testament to the fact that impact is as much about organisation as it is about resource. In such a space, partnership working takes on a radically more transformational role. Indeed, our Promise Worker Pilot highlights partnership working as one of three key responsibilities, alongside face-to-face engagement and impact measurement. It cannot be underestimated.

We'll be launching our report into partnership working in October 2013.

So what might a Promise Partnership look like?

As you might imagine, answering this question is a journey we are on rather than a solution we intend to hypothesise, although the report provides a number of insights. Produced by Emma Gasson and Ella Britton, a wide range of individuals and organisations shared their experience of partnership working both as users and service providers. This included children, young people and parents as well as professionals from education, health, social services and the voluntary sector. Suffice to say, the report has raised more questions than it answers.

However, it does move us towards a more effective and powerful way of working together across our zone. It speaks much more to the innovative approach of the Strive Partnership than HCZ, whose work on building a cradle to career civic infrastructure and blogs on community engagement in collective impact have been hugely enlightening as we think about our work at The Winch.

Strive's work on 'a cradle to career civic infrastructure' seems far more relevant to a London context.

We hope to launch the Promise Partnership Report in October this year, to share our learning from its development and publication as well as outlining next steps to supporting what is an already emerging partnership of cradle to career, wraparound support. The Promise Worker Pilot and Promise Tech, a platform to support impact measurement and partnership working, are central tenets of this strand of our work and we look forward to building, and learning from, a coalition of organisations and professionals who can move forward our promise to tackle child poverty in North Camden.