Adapting To Support Families During The Pandemic

Kidz Klub Leeds is a children’s charity working to benefit children of all backgrounds in the communities they serve: confronting child poverty and to encourage children’s mental, moral, spiritual and physical development.

Through the Covid-19 Infrastructure Grants, they were able to continue to support their community during the pandemic

 

• Can You describe your organisation and the people/communities you support?

 

Kidz Klub Leeds has been working from within communities, right on the frontlines in some of the most deprived areas of the city (and UK) for over 21 years. The charity was launched as a citywide faith based project to reach children growing up in poverty on a scale that had not been seen before. We are currently present in seven inner city wards, three of which are predominately BAME communities. We also support refugee and asylum seeker families. We’ve reached over 26,000 children across two generations. We’ve carried out over 600,000 home visits and 54 of our team members are from or have intentionally relocated to live in the communities we serve. We work in partnership with others in the city working with children and young people in every area of their lives; at home, at school and in the community.

 

•  How have you been supported by Leeds Community Foundation and what has this funding enabled you to do? 

 

We have had a wonderful relationship with Leeds Community Foundation since 2009 which started with our partnership with the Jimbo’s Fund managed by the Foundation. As one of the areas of Leeds that we serve is East Leeds, the core funding received from this fund really helped us with our work for a number of years.

We were delighted to be awarded funds from the Covid19 Strategic Infrastructure Grant scheme in July 2020 in response to the pandemic for our much needed Family Support Work. This grant funded our team with our “boots on the ground” front line Children’s Champion response work.

As a charity, we responded quickly to the health crisis with urgency and flexibility, classed as Key Workers we pivoted our model and drew our attention to what our communities most needed; calls, texts to our most vulnerable children and their families, speaking with schools and social care teams as required, setting up a Kidz Klub Leeds advice line, referrals to food banks, working with partners to source / deliver food and essential packages, signposting to housing support, posting cards and messages, posting out Kidz Klub Leeds colouring sheets which meant we could also include critical information for our families as the health crisis unfolded.

This emergency type funding at such a critical time from the Foundation was especially welcome as other sources of fundraising income had dropped off.

 

• Can you give us an example of an individual and or group and how they have responded to this work?

From our monitoring and evaluation during the height of the pandemic asking for feedback to our work from both parents and children, we received the following statements;

You’re not just there for the kids, it’s the adults as well. There’s something different about Kidz Klub, you’re not like other services. Not many services are there in the same way as you are. You aren’t judgemental and you take time to really build relationships with families.

I really appreciate the time taken to sit with Hannah and talk with her: we’ve had many doorstop visits talking about the complexities of life, about what we’re facing as a family and sharing joys.

 

• What challenges and opportunities do you face as an organisation in the current climate?

The current climate of constant change management, pivoting charity operating models and rewriting risk assessments presents challenges. Like so many charities Kidz Klub Leeds model has struggled to return to a ‘business as usual’ and this has been the case for two years. We celebrated our 20^th Birthday just before the first Lockdown and although we have a highly adaptive and resilient team, ever changing work flows and patterns can take its toll.

We are exploring the digital space for our new social enterprise venture Big Kid Collective which sells environmental and ethically sourced branded products. All profits go back to supporting our work with inner city communities.

This enterprise is an opportunity but we would welcome support in digital marketing best practices and investment to see this venture off the starting blocks and reap returns. We are working hard to push forward with our five-year strategy but the funding landscape is uncertain and so plugging the gaps of funding plans and seeing a good ROI on them is a challenge.

 

• How is your organisation preparing for the future, and what kind of funding is needed?

We have a robust and adaptive model, we are still very much meeting the needs of our community and know how we want to grow our model. We have a very detailed five-year strategy document following a large community wide stakeholder consultation piece done three years ago.

We want to do more of what we know works for our communities, our theory of change has proven key during the response to the pandemic and will be even more key in the levelling up post pandemic. Core funding is key as it gives us the flexibility to do what we know works and within broad timescales.