ABOUT US
Enhancing Life Chances by Bringing Communities Together in Handsworth
We exist to enhance the life chances of children, young people and families by bringing together diverse communities in Handsworth and across Birmingham.
We manage a broad range of community and educational project working alongside our school association members and community partners to improve the lives of families. We focus on enhancing the life chances of children in our city, on family health and wellbeing and on social integration. We do this through our strategic priorities:
Strategic Priorities
- to support schools to work together and share learning for improvement
- organise initiatives that help to raise the aspirations of local children and their families
- promote good citizenship and the advancement of learning for all.
We have enabled a huge variety of projects since our inception in 1999, including our flagship Young People’s Parliament, our schools learning networks and more recently organising our community’s response to Covid-19 pandemic: creating a food distribution hub from our conference centre.
Our mission is to promote youth inclusion and family wellbeing advancement through the delivery of enjoyable, creative, and effective projects and services. Headteachers from member schools work alongside local residents, project participants, partner organisations and volunteers to achieve this together. We work predominantly with BAME families experiencing high levels of poverty, low incomes and high unemployment in areas with high crime rates and poor rates of health. Families have reduced access to support due to multiple complex issues. Many families do not have English as a first language and this compounds their difficulty in accessing support services. You can check out the short biographies of our Board and our staff.