After 10 months of hard work, we are excited to celebrate that in June 2023, The Kids Network were awarded the London Youth Bronze Quality Mark! It is a nationally recognised quality mark that is accredited to organisations that deliver the highest standard of youth work across the capital.
The Kids Network Founder and CEO Sarah Woodcock said of the award: “I’m so very proud of the team for achieving this level of recognition for their commitment to providing a safe, inclusive and high quality programme for children across London”
What is the Bronze award for?
The Bronze Quality Mark is a quality assurance framework that provide youth organisations with a badge of excellence. The process is comprehensive and is based on a variety of criteria such as outcomes and aims for young people, safeguarding, diversity and inclusion, health and safety, partnerships, leadership and charity governance.
London Youth’s goal for organisations is for a journey of continually improving polices, procedures and programmes following best practice.
What does this mean for TKN?
For us as an organisation, this means that
- We provide a high-quality programme for young people from diverse backgrounds.
- We create a welcoming & inclusive environment for all our staff, children, trustees and wonderful volunteers
- We are committed to positive outcomes for young people
- We collect and monitor evidence to prove our impact
- We take youth engagement and youth leadership seriously
- We operate in a safe and secure way, aligned to legal safeguarding requirements
The accreditation was managed and steered by TKN’s Head of Operations, Natalie, but the process was without a doubt a full TKN team effort. When asked what she enjoyed most about the process Natalie said:
‘In order to pass the accreditation lots of evidence had to be submitted to demonstrate how TKN has met the criteria, this involved exploring every single part of TKN and really getting to grips with the work every single team member is doing. It was so refreshing and inspiring to learn all the wonderful processes in place for onboarding our volunteers and matching them to a mentee, seeing the lengths our volunteering team and programme managers go to in order to match our children to a mentor that is representative of them and has the qualities the mentee has asked for. In addition, safeguarding has always been at the forefront of TKNs activities, and I was proud to see that our safeguarding procedures were already at such a high standard. I learnt loads from completing the accreditation and the framework provided by London Youth and it has really helped me to improve and develop what we do at The Kids Network.’
If you are interested in joining our network as a mentor them visit our Become a Mentor page. Or if you are a school who would like to engage with the programme contact Ruth our Head of Programmes at r.simmonds@thekidsnetwork.org.uk
Further resources
https://londonyouth.org/what-we-do/quality-assurance/
https://londonyouth.org/what-we-do/quality-assurance/bronze-quality-mark/
Click here to access our certificate
