Nurture Group Network
Nurturing a more outward-facing approach
The work of the Nurture Group Network centres on making changes to the lives of the most vulnerable children and young people. As an umbrella group established over 40 years ago their work encourages vulnerable children with social problems or emotional behavioural difficulties to be more emotionally resilient, thereby overcoming barriers to education. They do this by working with teachers, training them to be more emotionally intelligent.
Over the past 40 years the organisation's membership has spread across the UK, with offices in Wigan and Glasgow. They were originally in offices just off the Pentonville Road in North London but wanted a more social, open plan environment. Chief Executive Angela Sarkis, CBE, heard about CAN's services through her links in the sector and arranged a visit. They moved into CAN Mezzanine's nearby Old Street Offices in July 2010 and have quickly integrated with others in the CAN community.
"We're quite strong across the country, but we also wanted to have the London office to increase our profile here," says Hannah Millinship, Executive Assistant to Angela Sarkis.
One big advantage of CAN Mezzanine is the availability of meeting and conference rooms on-site. "A lot of our work is training," says Hannah. "If you want to run sessions with 50 people or more in London you need a big space which can be very expensive. But here we can run training courses, events and AGMs with very low overheads. When you are a small organisation every little bit that you can shave off your budget helps."
Hannah also credits their move to Old Street with helping the organisation to become more outward facing.
"Being able to share offices with other small, similarly minded organisations is brilliant for networking and for finding out more about what's going on in the sector" she says. "One of the best things is that everyone you meet here is in the third sector, so there's a lot of commonality as a starting point. When there are a lot of small organisations with just three or four people there's a lot of common ground. You can find best practice and compare different ways of doing things. In any economic climate that's really useful for smaller organisations, but when cuts are heavy and money doesn't go as far as it once did it's invaluable to be able to partner up with people.
The whole team love the atmosphere at CAN Mezzanine along with the networking events and the intranet. "It's welcoming and friendly and supportive here," they say. "We love it here and we'll take over the whole ground floor if you're not careful!"
For more information on The Nurture Group Network visit http://www.nurturegroups.org/