“We need more brave ventures like West London Zone to prevent there being many more [young people left behind].”

Jenni Russell in The Times, April 2018

WLZ is a partnership of local organisations working together to ensure that all the children and young people in our community reach their full potential.

We do this by helping charities, local authorities, schools and children’s centres deliver the best possible opportunities and support to the children and young people in this community.

Over the next 10 years we have a plan to reach 13,000 children and young people across three square miles of inner West London.

As a ‘Collective Impact’ initiative, our approach was designed together with local people to better utilise the assets that already existed in the area. This means that we work with local schools and children’s centres to identify the children and young people aged 0-25 who could most benefit from being part of West London Zone. Then with the support of our Link Workers, each person (and their family) participates in an individually tailored programme of opportunities and support from our local partners. Behind the scenes, the WLZ ‘backbone’ team organises the partnership, manages finance and analyses the data collected by our team on the ground.

West London Zone works with the best local, regional and national charities. Being part of West London Zone does not compromise partners’ independence but it does mean there is ‘one team’ around the child or young person – rather than multiple agencies working in isolation from each other.

West London Zone is evidence-led. This means that we use data to proactively identify the children who we think would benefit from our offer, to keep a close eye on their progress (together with data from local authorities, schools and other bodies), and to ensure our programmes are tailored to each individual child. We then produce visual ‘data dashboards’, to show how each child and charity partner is getting on.