ChurchWorks Family Hubs Toolkit Launch to Strengthen Local Partnerships

We had a fantastic time launching our new ChurchWorks Family Hubs Toolkit on Tuesday 24th June.

The Family Hubs toolkit has been written by experts who have spent years running or supporting Family Hubs in churches themselves. The aim of the toolkit is to foster better partnership working between churches and Local Authorities to support vulnerable children and families.  This is a joint mission which many churches pour their time, effort and love into, whilst just across the road, staff in a Family Hub or children’s centre may be doing the same. 

In a country where scores of children are struggling with the basic life skills to flourish in school, where 1 in 3 children are living in poverty, and where the 2024 Good Childhood report found that the UK’s children are now the unhappiest in Europe, we need to find allies in the mission to support children and families and build partnerships wherever we can!

This was the theme across the launch event - the incredible passion and shared values from churches and Local Authorities alike to support families. The toolkit provides a step-by-step guide to help churches or civic organisations understand the other side better - complete with a tailored way to ‘view’ the toolkit if you are from either organisation so that you only see the parts of the toolkit that are written for you.

The toolkit provides a wealth of information including detailed explanations of principles and guidance, templates, diagrams, and links to further resources. But it is intentionally laid out in a way to help users find the specific information you need, quickly and easily.  In this way it is detailed enough to really help users move on to the next step of your journey to starting or partnering with Family Hubs… but user-friendly enough that you won’t drown in all the information!

In the launch event, we heard about:

• How churches/faith groups and Local Authorities can be great allies in supporting local families because of their many shared values
• Some of the barriers to partnership working, how to overcome them, and the gold and diamonds we find when we do collaborate!
• Some practical help and tools including mapping that our partners the Gather Movement and Spurgeons can offer churches looking to start Family Hubs
• How one church went about designing their amazing Family Hub offer

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You can read and use the ChurchWorks Family Hubs Toolkit here, and do watch the launch webinar back here.

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