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.

Progress report: our emerging North Camden Promise Zone.

At the end of 2011, we launched The Promise Academy: a new model for tackling child poverty in Camden. It was a model based on an eighteen-month step-change process which involved gathering best practice, undertaking learning and research from across the globe and restructuring the organisation.

The new model is premised on a model developed by Harlem Children’s Zone, described by a recent Save the Children and University of Manchester report as ‘doubly holistic’: a voluntary sector-led initiative working both long-term (from cradle to career) and across every area of a child’s experience (education, health, social services and so on).

In importing and developing the Harlem Children’s Zone model, it differs in a couple of central ways. Firstly, it sees us not as the sole or primary delivery agent of services but as an infrastructure and partnership-brokering organisation delivering the core cradle-to-career pipeline but focused on coordinating a wealth of service provision which does not exist in the Harlem context. Secondly, it invests a great deal more energy and thought in measuring impact, moving beyond the ‘college equals success’ formula to a deeper engagement in what success looks like, how it can be fostered and measured and how this relates to a long-term, multi-agency environment. In this respect, it could be argued to be ‘triply holistic’: adding depth, to breadth and length.

The development of our thinking from the initial launch of The Promise Academy has encouraged us to move towards an increasingly zone-focused model which is less institutional and more open to an impact-led approach. We recently established a map of the North Camden Promise Zone aligned with Lower Super Output Area boundaries (small geographical areas) to allow us to benefit from existing data and research and using this to target resources. We have overlaid this LSOA-structured ‘zone’ with local knowledge and soft data: for example the presence of dispersal zones, higher levels of anti-social behaviour, areas where young people typically gather and where we know there are much more localised ‘gaps’ in service provision. It is this area we will focus on delivering a cradle to career ‘pipeline’ drawing together a full range of partners to deliver long-term outcomes tackling child poverty.

The Winch’s new strategic plan maps out a five-year pilot for the North Camden Promise Zone which aims to engage the local authority and a range of local partners in the delivery of ‘a pipeline of wraparound, opportunity-building support and multidisciplinary care from cradle to career to support every child and young person to flourish’.

The pipeline is built on a number of modest changes around our existing infrastructure which works with children and young people from four to twenty-five years old and focuses on their educational, emotional, physical and social wellbeing and development. In addition to this, we have launched the following developments:

• The Promise Nursery: scoping out the early years element of the pipeline, drawing together experts in early years and child development and building on successes and lessons from Sure Start centres. 
• The enterprise programme: the post-secondary school education element of the pipeline, supporting young people who are not in education, employment or training by investing in and incubating their business ideas. 
• The Promise Partnership: developing a local partnership of agencies and services focused on delivering shared outcomes in the Zone. We are currently completing a piece of action research around Partnership membership and working. 
• The Promise Worker Pilot: a three-year project piloting a best practice approach to youthwork in which workers provide the central relationship-holding function of a cradle to career model. This is a casework-based approach with resource for partnership working and impact measurement which will be externally evaluated. 
• Promise Tech: a three-part technological backroom to support the delivery of NCPZ through personalised plans, comprising: a longitudinal impact measurement application, a partnership learning and information-sharing dashboard and a number of applications to support ground level, real-time and user-led data-sharing. 
• The Promise Research Project: a multi-disciplinary, practice-based research and development programme drawing together child development, health, sociology and social mobility to evaluate and drive impact as part of the North Camden Promise Zone model. 

These elements have completion dates ranging from December 2012 to 2014. There are a small number of other elements which are not included as they have not yet been initiated.

It sometimes feels as if 2012 has been a year in which we've rarely had the exposure or volume we were fortunate enough to have in 2011, but it has allowed us to focus on making good on our promise to children and young people. The model-whether Promise Academy or Promise Zone-is taking shape.

A first version of our emerging North Camden Promise Zone.

Developing Children's Zones: a new report.

A few months back I met with Abigail Wood, Chris Wellings and Hollie Warren from Save the Children, after they heard about our trip to New York and in particular Harlem Children's Zone. They were interesting in hearing about our experience, insights, observations and how we are intending to apply our learning from Harlem as we look to develop a cradle to career pipeline of support for children and young people in our part of the world.

There are, of course, amazing lessons to be drawn from HCZ and Geoffrey Canada's leadership. It has been interesting to see how the much-lauded 'Promise Neighbourhoods' promised by Barack Obama have fared-the only reports I have read suggest they have often floundered for lack of local infrastructure and personnel. To a degree though, perhaps we shouldn't be overly surprised at this-simply because a model is replicated in the same country, doesn't mean it's the same context.

Suffice to say, the difference between a children's zone in Harlem and London would require a far greater amount of reflection. There is always a risk with any inspiring or groundbreaking initiative, that we seek to import it without adequate reflection on context, partnership, resource and leadership. It's why I also think the jury is out on the debate about scalability: how uniform and easily repeatable can a highly effective approach be? And what then are the tools that allow this endeavour to succeed?

Whilst it's a shame not to have been acknowledged in Save the Children's recent report then, it's a very exciting piece of work which highlights the prospect of English Children's Zones-and what they might look like. For the most part, the report acts as an excellent introduction to the model and is certainly a document I have shared with our team, supporters and others who are interested in what we're developing. It's downloadable here, and on Save the Children's website.

There is always a challenge and a question to be posed about to what degree one can codify the elements of a model or change them-and still allow the model to retain adequate consistency and identity with the original. Certainly the report's helpful description of a 'doubly holistic approach' (meaning working with children both over a long period and across all areas) aligns with its Harlem origins, as does the attempt to wrestle meaningfully with data.

However, there was one critical oversight in Save the Children's report-a perhaps predictable assumption made in importing the children's zone concept from the US to the UK.

It is easy to forget that the emergence of Harlem Children's Zone, formerly Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, came out of a period of reflection and change initiated by Geoffrey Canada and his senior leadership team. Rheedlen was an organisation not hugely dissimilar to The Winch in terms of its culture and decision-making approach, although it was much larger: it was a community organisation that responded to need wherever it saw it, rather than in a focused and strategic way.

It's well worth having a look at the website of The Bridgespan Group, the consultancy who supported a great deal of change at Rheedlen. Read alongside 'Whatever It Takes', the story of HCZ as written by journalist Paul Tough, it becomes clear that Rheedlen never started off with a desire to build a charitable behemoth with an annual turnover of $85m per annum. In fact, to begin with there was no intention to establish schools, but to work in partnership with existing ones.

Canada discovered that for an array of reasons, Harlem schools didn't want to let him in. And to cut a long story short, as schools were central-although not exclusively so-to delivering impact, the decision was made to establish Promise Academies, the initially controversial charters that those going through the full HCZ pipeline became students at. Canada states that his preference would have been to partner meaningfully with existing educational establishments-but they weren't interested.

I mention this because part of HCZ's power-its capacity, culture, flexibility and ability to leverage funding, relationships, resources and sponsorship-was the exclusive privilege of a nonprofit organisation as opposed to a form of local or regional government. This isn't to say that partnering with government agencies wasn't ultimately central to success-in fact it very much was-but that Canada and his team played a central, relational, infrastructure role in developing a pipeline and filling in the gaps.

There is, hence, an understandable assumption that English Children's Zones would be coordinated, delivered and funded by the state (StC's report focuses on schools). That would potentially be fantastic-and an interesting approach to pilot. However, HCZ's impact wasn't primarily about its administration and organisation, but about the strengths listed above and of course its place within the community: a position of trust, of longevity, a place where people would come voluntarily, not because they'd been referred.

I am excited to see how the children's zone conversation in London and the UK more widely evolves. It has enormous potential, and there are many exciting and excited voices in the debate. However, I hope that as we move forward we use this report and the buzz around it in the right way: to grow the local as well as having the policy conversation, to foster a culture of children's zones, not just a portfolio of them.

It's often said that 'small is beautiful'. At The Winch it's beginning to feel more fitting to say that 'small is powerful'. It's in these 'small' contexts-where we know our communities, the assets and needs and opportunities within them-that we are building a children's zone model that is far more powerful and effective than today's policy nod or tomorrow's fundraising idea. And most of all, it's an approach consistent with our promise to children and young people.