Our Projects

NMW Pine Green

Our Projects

Here you will find our library, including some of our favourite projects from the last couple of years. Our areas of innovation and research represent the issues that we care most about - children, families and education. We have signifcant skill and experience in improving outcomes for children. We love working closely with communities and organisations to create, deliver, evaluate and sustain projects, policies and programmes that enable children to succeed in a world of change.

A project supporting at-risk women who are either pregnant or with a child in the 1001 critical days

Overview

Nurture Outdoor Kindergarten was founded in 2015 in Worcestershire, and has been working with children and families to enable respectful parenting, childcare and education ever since. Increasingly, the Kindergarten were seeing families needing additional support. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated challenges for families, particularly women and children.

The Challenge

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted significant support needs for increasing numbers of families at the Kindergarten. During 2020, there was a sharp increase in families seeking support for domestic violence, women solo parenting in difficult situations – e.g. poor housing, abusive relationships, low income, lack of choice and/or confidence. Social Services had to narrow their support measures to be deployed to families at significant risk of harm. This left a serious gap for those families needing different kinds of support.

We began working with Nurture Outdoor Kindergarten in 2021 to set up and pilot tailored support programmes for individual families.

What We Did

In 2021, we supported practitioners at Nurture Outdoor Kindergarten, gathering insights into the struggles women and children were facing during the pandemic. Practitioners gathered evidence for case studies through empathy interviews with the families they were working with.

Together with practitioners, we then developed a clear plan to empower the women they were working with. Priorities included clothing and equipment for newborns and pregnant women, working closely with social services to ensure safety for the women and children, positive parenting 1:1 mentoring, and allocating a ‘case manager’ to each family.

Our current focus is on sustaining and growing the project to serve more women in surrounding counties, whilst also building out programmes for women to include life skills and entry into the workforce.

We Created

Together with Nurture Outdoor Kindergarten in Worcester, we created a new programme of tailored support for women and their children in the 1001 critical days. We look forward to building out this project with Nurture Outdoor Kindergarten to further support at-risk women and children.