Our hearts skipped a beat when, in August, we heard that we had been nominated for the Families Included Prize. It is our opportunity to find a solution to family isolation, but where do we start?

Together we are Buffy Playbus (based in North West Essex) and Spurgeons Children’s Centres (run on behalf of Essex County Council).

Our organisations have worked collaboratively in the past to support parents and carers with small children. During that time we have become very aware of the problems that many families face because of social isolation.

During our initial conversations about entering the prize, we came up with a title for our project: Moving Together for a Brighter Future.  That was the easy part. Now we have been nominated we have to put our ideas into practice.

We met up with Jacqui Innes from Uttlesford Council for Voluntary Service who spoke to us about how what we really envisaged would help families and also how our two organisations would work together. Exploring these topics was so important and we hope that by doing this we have ironed out all the creases and can now move forward with our ideas.

We now need to bring families together for a bit of fun.  One thing we do know about parents, carers and children, is that where there’s cake involved we are likely to be well supported. Once everyone has had time to relax over a cup of tea, we’ll be looking to get some ideas underway that will help us understand the causes of isolation and how we can reduce it.

We have chosen three different communities within Uttlesford to work with on this, and have carefully formulated four questions that we feel will give us the causes and perhaps sustainable solutions to social isolation.

Now the excitement begins as we have a chance to test, explore and deliver our ideas and we will move together for a brighter future.