Play for Progress
Take Note: Take Away
WHO ARE PLAY FOR PROGRESS?
Play for Progress is a charity that delivers therapeutic and educational music and arts programmes, advocacy, and wellbeing support for traumatised and socially-isolated unaccompanied minor refugees and asylum-seekers.
They work with a close-knit and resilient community of young people, artists, musicians, activists, educators, therapists, and allies.
A key strand of their work is to connect, collaborate and share knowledge on best-practices with external communities and networks to ensure their young people can develop routes for long-term success.
WHAT IS THE PROJECT?
Our Take Note: Take Away package with Play for Progress worked on developing a new Theory of Change for their organisation - to define their long-term vision, to articulate the challenges they are working to address, and to establish the outcomes of their work in order to best demonstrate the profound impact they have on young people and their communities.
WHAT DID IT ACHIEVE?
We ran the Take Note: Take Away package at a pivotal moment for Play for Progress, as the organisation responds to the coronavirus crisis with adapted but continued support for its young people, and begins to embark upon longer term strategic planning and securing multi-year core funding.
The session took Play for Progress’s two Co-Founders and a Trustee through the Theory of Change process to create their first full Theory of Change. This puts Play for Progress in a significantly stronger position to navigate the uncertain future posed by coronavirus, providing them with a clear strategic framework.
This will form the basis of their short-term coronavirus response decisions and their longer-term direction as an organisation. It will ensure that any future partnership working directly connects to their mission and objectives. And ultimately, it will enable them to make a stronger case to funders, stakeholders and networks for the impact of their work.
“The whole approach of this package was incredibly useful. The deep dive, preparation, and clarity of expectations from Take Note gave us faith that they had considered how to guide us into a new phase of thinking, then gave us the confidence to use what we learned and adapt it ourselves. We want to work with Take Note forever!"
Co-Founder of Play for Progress
“The approaches and tools we now have at our disposal put Play for Progress on course to be better prepared to deal with this new challenging landscape, particularly around clarifying the organisation's work for funders. It was fantastic that the package and specifically the session responded to such a particular need at this time.”
Trustee, Play for Progress
Lead image: First Light Festival, credit: Charlotte McGuinness. Gallery images: from First Light Festival, Suffolk Artlink’s Around the Table project funded by Suffolk Carers Fund, photo from Suffolk Artlink’s Lowestoft Folk intergenerational project funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund, credit: Adam Barnes, Caroline Gervay, Mykola Romanovsky.