These last two years have been two of the most challenging of Grimm & Co’s lifetime. Covid-19 has affected so many families across Yorkshire and the
children and young people we serve. We asked ourselves how we should respond to this. As demand for our services grew from the most marginalised communities, we quickly realised that we needed to start delivering our programmes and activities differently. So, we switched online, delivered engaging story packs into family homes, and pivoted our school programmes to help prevent the loss of any learning for teachers or pupils. Grimm & Co did not shut down. We changed the way we delivered all our programmes and activities to support our communities.
As a charity, we have also pushed ourselves to deepen our work around equity, inclusion and the relevance of what we do for the communities we serve. We are currently taking action to gather the perceptions of our stakeholders and communities to make our internal practices more equitable, make our commitment to anti-racist education more explicit and to ensure that more ethnically diverse people and those with protected characteristics are accessing our services. This year we have secured consultation support from an external organisation to examine our practices and our organisational culture, leading to an objective audit that will help us to improve.
Grimm & Co’s approach is built on a foundation of research and is regularly pulled apart for reflection, evaluation and further learning. We also deliver supportive, creative learning programmes to those who influence children’s socio-cultural literacies to families, to teachers and to pupils in schools.
We wanted to share with you what we have done. Here is the story so far…
