In our advocacy work, we share our experience and help others to put children’s voices into action

Children show us every time that they can improve an organisation’s effectivity and efficiency when their voices are at the heart of service design and evaluation.

Through our research, we have equipped ourselves with the skills and experience to deliver bespoke toolkits and training workshops to other organisations that serve children. We provide everything needed to enable an organisation to evaluate existing services or design new ones through the eyes of the children they aim to support. We understand that every child and every service has a unique culture and challenges. Our work is designed to use this as a strength.

In enabling organisations to focus on children’s insights, we provide simple ways to improve their work. We also help organisations uncover new, positive effects of their work, which the adults simply did not anticipate or recognise before.

We have worked both in the UK and overseas alongside children’s orphanages, schools, volunteer companies and large education NGOs.

Case study: Volcanes Education Project (VCEP) had for 8 years been assuming the benefits of its additional schooling to 400 children living in the excluded and often impoverished community that it served. Whilst regularly holding staff, parents and donor meetings, children had never systematically had the opportunity to report on their own experiences with VCEP. We designed a series of games and practical tasks through which children aged 7-14 could comfortably express their emotions and associations with the project as well as their ideas of how it could be improved. Results provided new insights that, alongside meeting VCEP’s intended goal of inspiring children to dream and achieve in school, the service also gave the children a place to feel safe within their ‘unsafe’ community. The children also requested access to drinking water, guidance on careers and improved access to football leagues. These requests were responded to and we were able to support with funding.

Once we have worked alongside an organisation, we will do all we can to help them respond to the voices of children by supporting new or improved programming.