Our Partners
Columba 1400
Together, Columba 1400 and What Matters to You are working to create the conditions needed to change systems. Their work helps to inspire and is a catalyst to unlock the potential of young people and their important adults, including parents, professionals and social leaders.
Columba 1400 are alongside families, practitioners and senior leaders creating space for them to recognise and believe that they can “be the change” for and with children and families. They act as a catalyst for deep collaboration across agencies with a focus on families, and the wider community by hosting spaces where people feel safe, valued and listened to. Values based practice supports us all to create the conditions for change within communities and those that live and work there.
Our Learning Partners
The Learning Partners support our continuous and collective learning, reviewing existing and emerging evidence, and offering help to decide what to adopt, adapt or abandon. In this way we are generating insights into how to create more effective, earlier ways of supporting children and families and our progress towards the outcomes we are seeking.
From 2019- 2024, the Learning Partner team was Research for Real, Animate and Symmetric Scenarios working alongside us as we explored the difference we were making. The team were Cathy Sharp (Research for Real), Jo Kennedy (Animate), Emily Whyte (Animate) and Douglas McKelvie and Donald Scott (Symmetric Scenarios). The learning team also included Kerstin Jorna an analyst on secondment from Dundee City Council, with support from the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund. The team published a series of reports at the conclusion of 2024 which are available at https://wm2u.co.uk/our-reports
In this final phase of the work from Jan 2024 – June 2025, Jo and Emily from Animate and Kerstin from Dundee City Council make up a smaller learning partner team, continuing to provide learning as we go and supporting the evaluation being undertaken by Dartington.
In 2025, Dartington Service Design Lab have joined us to undertake an independent evaluation of WM2U learning journey and the overall approach.
This evaluation seeks to understand the impact of the approach and how WM2U best achieves real change and benefit for communities, practitioners and decision makers.