Looking ahead to our priorities for 2024
Chief Executive Officer
For the last few years, we’ve been honing our craft and continuing to build on our rich 60-year heritage and strong foundations in social research. We’ve fortified this by developing a more integrated approach: blending evidence-informed research with youth-centred co-design and systems thinking – resulting in nuanced and highly applied approaches.
In 2024, you’ll hear less about the ‘how’ and a lot more about the ‘why’. As a team, we’ll be steadfast and focused on tackling inequalities in the outcomes and experiences of children and young people and doing so via equitable approaches to advancing systemic change.
Recognising the challenges facing children, young people, and families
To us, the enormous pressures affecting children, young people, families, and communities are obvious. In recent years the cost-of-living crisis has resulted in many families feeling increased stresses related to poverty, economic insecurity, and uncertainty about the future. These challenges include the climate crisis, exposure to discrimination, worries about employment prospects and opportunities, and concerns about safety and belonging both at home and in the community.
These are big issues, with injustices and stark inequalities cutting across them. Children and young people are bearing the brunt in society, and the burden is unequally distributed to those with less power, resources, and agency. This is painful and wrong.
Our three areas of focus
That’s why, from 2024, we’re doubling down to catalyse systemic change and tackle inequalities in three main areas:
Giving children the best start in life: Working within and across early years contexts (health systems, early childhood education and care, social care, and community partners).
Promoting mental health and wellbeing: Creating conditions for positive physical and mental health; strengthening youth, community and health services and infrastructures (working with health systems, youth and community work and public health partnerships).
Growing up safe and cared for: Creating conditions of safety, care and belonging – both at home (working alongside children’s social care, child protection and multi-agency partnerships) and in the community (working alongside violence reduction units, community safety partnerships and youth work settings).
Getting the foundations right is critical if children and young people are to thrive and we are to build rich, vibrant, and abundant communities.
We’ve accrued decades of experience, knowledge, and insight in these areas. Whilst each area has its nuance and specific influences, we also know there are cross-cutting opportunities for systemic change.
What is our work going to look like?
We’ll continue to build on our existing work and approaches, albeit in a more focused way and with some bigger ambitions.
Achieving impact through doing: As a research and design charity, we will continue to undertake specific research, design, and evaluation projects, increasingly focused on the early years, youth mental health, child protection and children's social care, and violence reduction spaces. We will continue to learn in partnership and practice.
Strengthening community-led change: We will increasingly seek to form and cement long-term, committed partnerships in communities across the UK. This is where we think we can really begin to seed lasting systemic change. This builds on existing relationships in our place-based work, including our youth mental health work with Kailo in Northern Devon and Newham, partnerships with local authorities in Scotland, and emerging relationships with the Westminster Foundation in areas such as Chester and Westminster.
Sharing learning: This is where the bigger ambition comes in. We do great work, but much of the learning and impact remains nestled in our project-based work. It’s fair to say that a scarcity-orientated and non-profit consultancy model practically limits the time and resources we and others have to share, enable and multiply learning and impact effectively.
Interested in collaborating on any of the above? Get in touch!
What’s most frustrated me at Dartington over the last ten years is that so much of our learning and impact resides in the impactful partnerships and collaborations we form, and not sufficiently beyond them.
Systemic change also inherently requires multiple stakeholders to come together and play their best role in bringing about change. As a research and design charity, we play but only a limited role in a much bigger system.
In 2024, we’ll explore ways to stretch from being a ‘doing Lab’ into more of an ‘Open Lab’ - we'll be testing with some bold and brave funders, ways to share more about what we learn and being more vocal about what we think is required to affect change. We hope this will inspire and support others in a shared mission of advancing systemic change for children and young people across communities in the UK, as by working together, we can achieve more meaningful change.
To support you in exploring putting systemic thinking tools and approaches into practice, we are running a series of training and learning opportunities around Systems Thinking and Systemic Change. This includes online Introductory training sessions alongside tailored and cohort-based learning and practice journeys. Sign up to secure your place before they go.
If evidence-informed, co-designed and equitable systemic change to tackle inequalities for children and young people is your bag, then please stay tuned and connect us with others who share similar goals and might be interested in our work, or partnering with us this year. Please do get in touch to explore ways your organisation, charity, local authority, ICS, or health, social care or community partnership can work with us to advance place-based systems change in relation to children and young people’s health and wellbeing – we want to hear from you.
if you want to keep up to date with us this year and follow along for more, do sign up for our newsletter, which comes out monthly.
We’re looking forward to another busy year of integrating research, design, and systems methods to improve outcomes for children, young people, and families.