LEAP Strategy Day: Reviewing our impact on the community - Chris Wellings

Last week’s LEAP Strategy Day proved a fantastic opportunity to look at where we are as an organisation, what we are doing, who we are doing it for and how we can do it better. It was a chance to get the entire partnership in a room including parents, service partners and team members and give everyone a chance to share their opinions.

Proceedings were opened with a fantastic performance from local spoken word artist Benna on growing up in Lambeth. This really set the tempo for the day and got everyone in a good frame of mind.

Personally, I was particularly excited about sharing our forthcoming plans for community engagement and Parent Champions work and to talk through how we are expanding our services and programmes. We also spoke about the importance of helping all our services work together and become part of the Lambeth early years system long term. The overall aim is to create a single system where early years organisations can work together and information flows freely between them.

Over the course of the day we held workshops on systems change, community engagement, and the use of data in helping us tackle inequalities. We aimed to make sure that everyone present was represented and had their say and came away feeling included.

At LEAP, we want to continuously learn about what works and share this learning widely. Alongside delivering LEAP in four wards, our aim is to help influence the wider early years system in Lambeth and beyond.

The Strategy Day showed that LEAP has built some really strong foundations.  These will be critical as we increase and improve our services and look to make a big and long-lasting impact in the LEAP area and more widely.