Forgiveness, peace & hope: For Jimmy

Local Partnership sends its congratulations to our client, the For Jimmy charity which recently received the Community Partner Charity Award at the seventeenth annual Charity Times Awards.

This follows other national awards and commendations received this year and a growing reputation for their work for the safety and support of young people and communities in south London.

Local Partnerships has been working with For Jimmy on a project funded by the Cabinet Office’s Impact Readiness Fund. The project has enabled For Jimmy to evidence better the positive changes that its work brings and to find ways to embed impact measurement and management firmly into the culture of the organisation and to provide a platform to scale up its business and to grow its impact.

Bill Mizen, CEO of For Jimmy says:

“It’s been great to work with Local Partnership, We now have such a clear direction not only by way of the changes we want to see in our children and communities but also the role that Jimmy’s charity has in getting us there. The process that Local Partnerships have taken us through has engaged all the key stakeholders and has made them feel part of this future.”

The For Jimmy Charity was set up by Barry and Margaret Mizen, MBEs, after the murder of their son, Jimmy in 2008. It has a mission ‘to build a legacy of peace in Jimmy’s name and to help all our young people fulfil their potential and build the types of communities we want to live in’.

 For Jimmy’s work is currently focused within Lewisham and Deptford. The scope of its activities continues to grow and it has increased its turnover by 300 per cent in the last three years. It works in primary and secondary schools and delivers a cross curriculum programme of activities to support the resilience of young people. This includes an intensive social and academic programme that aims to create specific opportunities for marginalised young people disengaged from both school, their peers and their community.

 For Jimmy also works within the community to create ‘Safe Havens’: shops and businesses on the streets, near schools and on bus routes where people work in partnership to report and discourage crime and anti-social behaviour and to offer temporary shelter to young people in immediate danger. 172 street premises have already signed up to this scheme. For Jimmy has also established three ‘Good Hope’ Cafes. These not only provide a revenue stream to the charity but offer work placements and employment support to vulnerable young people. For Jimmy aims to provide a model of what a community business should look and feel like.

Local Partnerships supported For Jimmy in its thinking about the future direction of its business and was an integral part of the work to develop its strategy and objectives for the next three years. In a series of workshops with the senior team, Trustees and members of staff and also in discussion with stakeholders, Local Partnerships helped For Jimmy to develop its ‘Theory of Change’: a clear roadmap of the relationship between the problems the organisation is trying to address, the activities and interventions it is delivering and the outcomes it wants to achieve. The project work provided an important way of ‘testing’ and ‘confirming’ the mission of the organisation, of identifying the way that services could be extended or improved to increase impact and of setting out the pace and shape of its future growth. The process brought into a sharp focus the ways that For Jimmy could build upon its current measurement of outcomes in order to develop a stronger evidence base which could fully reflect the scope of its impact on both young people and also their local communities.

As a next stage, the outcomes of the project have helped For Jimmy secure the support of Greenwich University’s Faculty of Education and Health to work with them on an evaluation project of their work in primary schools. For Jimmy also recently took its campaign into the City of London hosting an interesting debate with senior corporate executives, and was joined by Boris Johnson, on ‘What role does big business play in creating safer and peaceful communities?’

For more information on For Jimmy please visit https://forjimmy.org/

To discover more about developing a theory of change and the positive impact it can have on what your organisation can achieve please click here and to find out how we could help you, please contact Anne Jarrett