Child-centred fundraising partnerships — rewriting the playbook

What does the largest furniture retailer in the world and one of the oldest and largest Children’s charities in the UK have in common? We both believe every child deserves a place to call home, a healthy start in life, a quality education, a right to play and a positive future.

IKEA and Barnardo’s have recently announced a three-year partnership, and we’re excited about the opportunities ahead as we seek to deliver a long-term positive impact on the lives of vulnerable young people across the UK, such as young carers.

We’re using our shared expertise, resources, and unique skills to develop innovative new projects. We’re also integrating this new approach with skills based volunteering and more traditional fundraising activities. By doing this, we are aiming to develop a truly transformative partnership which will provide a blueprint for corporate and charity partnerships of the future.

Photo: In our first co-design workshop

There are an estimated 800,000 young carers across the UK, with 1 in 5 doing more than 20 hours of caring a week (Caring Alone, 2017), plus many young carers going unrecognised such as in the BAME community. A young carer is described as somebody (under 18) who provides support or who looks after a family member, partner or friend and who needs help because of their age, physical or mental illness or disability’ (Care Act, 2014).

I’m excited about the process we’re going through and the opportunity to re-write the playbook on how we engage a corporate partner in our cause, building on the wonderful work and knowledge of both organisations. While there will probably be more shiny and formal announcements along the way, we’ve decided to openly blog about the process. We want to model the open, trusting and value-driven relationship we are creating, as well as the iterative and learning journey we’re on.

So what’s different about this partnership?

Using a design-led approach, we’re taking a child-centred approach to this partnership, led by Martin Howard in our Corporate Fundraising team and working with IKEA’s team led by Hege Sæbjørnsen, UK Sustainability Manager.

In defining a child-centred approach to our three-year partnership and the activities, we have three initial guiding principles:

• Needs-driven: starting with evidence to inform our programme and bringing in the needs of young carers from our research and further participatory interactions.
• Rebalance power: by seeing young carers as our collaborators and ensuring an open process that brings young carers into the partnership governance model, we are creating opportunities for young carers to decide how we spend the money, on what, how they are represented and to guide us on the wider set of activities we propose over the three years.
• Co-designed: co-designing the range of activities and interventions together which aim to enhance support for young carers, and challenge and create awareness about the needs of young carers across the UK.

We’re focussing our efforts across three layers:

Image: Concentric circles representing the three levels the partnership will focus on

1. Service level: we’re dedicating a £100,000 donation from IKEA to providing respite support for young carers, designed with them and for them.
2. Organisational level: we’re bringing together our joint capability, resources and relationships to be creative in how we broaden our impact for young carers in the UK. Always starting with evidence, guided by young carers’ needs and our young carers’ voice and influence.
3. Societal level: we’re taking a targeted approach to the communication and advocacy we both undertake, using our joint voices to highlight the needs of young carers in the UK to influence from policy to citizens’ hearts and minds.

The partnership will also be underpinned by local community-based activities — with IKEA colleagues transforming the spaces of our children’s services, providing skills-based volunteering across our retail network, and fundraising to support our work across the UK.

What we have done so far

1. Developed and identified a joint mission, a set of joint values and working principles which led to us prioritising young carers.
2. Mapped our joint capability, resources (such as data), our relationships, wider circle of influence and additional programmes across the two organisations, bringing together a variety of people from policy staff, front line service workers, fundraising, marketing and communications, service design, sustainability and human resources.
3. Undertaken and surfaced desk research, working through our key evidence and highlighting the needs of the young carer with the core partnership teams.
4. We heard stories of the challenges and aspirations of young carers, front-line staff realities and the policy environment — creating a clear understanding for our joint team of the needs of young carers. This highlighted respite as the best area for support.
5. Held a user research session with young carers aged 8 to 16 considering their ideal respite, where they go for support and what good support looked like.
6. Commenced further development of our young carers governance model — a further announcement will be made on this soon.

We’re currently replaying our research back to our young carers and working with them to co-design support at the service level for the partnership.

Photo: A child participating in the workshop

Four key themes have emerged in considering our desktop research, synthesis of previous user research and the new collaboration with young carers.

• People like me: I want to hear, see and interact with people like me, now and into the future. Adults who understand what I’m going through, who’ve experienced young caring can pave a way and advocate for my needs in schools and the community, be a champion for my unique challenges and normalise my caring responsibilities with others. I want to interact with peers who also understand my caring role.
• Being the grown up: I take pride in my caring responsibilities (even if it’s challenging). Cooking and chores are things I do to take care of my family, I am grown up beyond my years because of my responsibilities but I’m also just a kid and want to act and play like one.
• My wider circle: My wider circle of family and trusted adults are important to me, we can share special time together. I wish there was more time for us to talk or spend time together as those relationships are important to my life.
• My play, my way: Although I’m just like any other child, I’m different. I like lots of different things and rest and relaxation from my care duties looks different to others around me. I’m keen to learn new things (cooking, languages, music) and often school is a source of time and space to do this.

We’ll use these themes, alongside the evidence and insights gathered to further inform our next steps.

It’s been refreshing to work alongside the two different teams (our Barnardo’s Corporate Fundraising team and IKEA’s Social Responsibility team), who’ve always remained open and purpose-driven, trialling new approaches to ensuring our exciting partnership is evidence-informed and child-centred, so that we deliver greater outcomes for the most vulnerable children in the UK.

There’s much more to come, and I look forward to sharing further learning and updates along the way. Stay tuned!

Melanie is the Head of Service Design in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team. To get the latest updates from the team, subscribe to blog.barnar.do on Medium, and follow #FutureBarnardos on Twitter.

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