Children's Links is a national charity, company limited by guarantee, and social enterprise.  Our mission is to improve the quality of children’s, young people’s and families' life experiences.

Children's Links has been successfully improving children’s life experiences since being established in 1993.  As an innovative and growing organisation, focused on customers and stakeholders, we have grown a wide range of services in response to needs and identified gaps. 

This plan describes the planned growth of the organisation to use our expertise to meet more of the needs of children and families in the UK and internationally with the aim of quadrupling our reach over the next four years.

Our values require us to deliver quality services for all customers; and to ensure that our services improve outcomes for children and young people. This means that we focus on achieving outcomes and targets.
 
Children’s Links has built its business on developing work to deal with gaps in services identified by our stakeholders, parents, children, funders and the wider community.  As a direct result, our services include those that support babies, children, young people, their parents and carers, the communities they live in, employers, and other children and young people’s organisations. Examples include:

• Participation services including consultancy and training
• Junior Youth Inclusion schemes and well-being services for schools
• Evaluation services
• Providing parenting training in partnership with parents
• Providing parenting/community support
• Developing Play in communities and schools
• Developing play facilities in communities
• Providing a range of services to support children and partners of offenders
• Running development and business support services for childcare providers
• Supporting development of Extended Schools and Children’s Centres
• Running good quality childcare
• Running healthy childcare initiatives - food and outdoor play - linked to Healthy Schools Agenda
• Training and development for the children’s workforce
• Qualification development and assessment  to meet employers needs
• Volunteering support and development
• Infrastructure services that support the development of the workforce and workforce strategies
• Services for organisations that work with children and young people
• Social enterprises that meet community needs and contribute a financial income stream into Children's Links
• A social enterprise with a  thriving childcare voucher service to support parents and employers
• Grants services on behalf of local authorities for play and childcare

Our work is funded from a wide variety of organisations and funding streams which include:

• Local Authority Contracts
• Central Government
• Regional Government contracts
• European funds, including ESF and ERDF
• Trusts

Over the last 3 years we have been investing in income-generating activities, and finance is gradually building from the following areas:

• Fundraising
•  Consultancy
• Social Enterprise activity

This plan builds on those foundations and seeks to further diversify our activities, geographic presence and sources of funding.