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Camden Children's Fund

The Children's Fund closed on March 31st 2008.

Most of the projects still exist and have been mainstreamed within services run by the council or partner agencies.

For more information please contact the youth offending team

 Children's Fund Logo

Location: Medburn Centre

Core Service:

Camden Children’s Fund was set up in 2001 as part of the Government’s strategy to tackle child poverty and social exclusion.  It works at stopping problems before they start for 5-13 year olds, and is recognised as making a real difference to the lives of the children, young people and families involved in the projects.  In March 2004 the government announced continued funding of the Children’s Fund to 2008 ‘to allow a smooth transition to new Children’s Trusts, which will be focused on preventative work and developed and delivered with the full engagement of the voluntary sector.’   

Objectives:

To ensure that we can pick up on early signs of difficulty, find out what’s wrong, and provide children and young people who have experienced difficulties with the help they need. 

Doing this will lead to reductions in truancy, improvements in educational performance, reductions in youth crime and antisocial behaviour, health improvement, more use of services by commonly excluded groups and more involvement of service users and the community in service delivery. 

Core Principles:

  1. Focus on those children, young people and families most at risk of getting left behind by Society.
  2. Work together with those services that already exist, and introduce new services where necessary.
  3. Get children and their families involved in making the programme work for them.
  4. Involve the voluntary sector as equal partners.
  5. Provide culturally appropriate services which are sensitive to individual needs.
  6. Gather and disseminate good quality evidence that informs decision-making processes and demonstrates impact.


The Projects:

There are seven projects in place working in partnership with the following:

  • ‘Our House’ Homeless Families Project (Camden Housing)
  • Primary Schools Project (Coram Family)
  • ‘Fusion’ Inclusive Play Project (Camden Play Service)
  • Somali Supplementary Schools Project (Somali Community Groups)
  • ‘Peace of Mind’ Somali Mental Health Project (Tavistock Clinic & Primary Care Trust)
  • Junior Youth Inclusion Programme (Castlehaven Community Association)
  • Restorative Justice Project (Youth Offending Team)