At A Better Start Southend we want to do things differently: helping people create great services that make a real difference to parents and children.

We want to find new ways to think about services for families; testing approaches that have worked well in other areas or may never have been tried before.

We’re focusing on projects that are either:

  • based on ideas that have worked elsewhere, so we can see if they work in Southend
  • based on the newest scientific thinking, so we can see if they work in practice
  • driven by creative new ideas that deserve an opportunity to prove themselves

Sign up to our newsletter for information about how to get involved with new projects as they come on stream.

Our current projects are:

Southend Supports Breastfeeding: scheme to promote a supportive culture for women who wish to breastfeed

Resilience, Ideas & Innovation Fund: An exciting opportunity to join with other organisations, groups or individuals for assistance in helping put in action a great idea about how to make lives better for young children and their families in ABSS wards

Previous A Better Start Southend Projects:

Buggy Active/Activise /Active Families (end date: 2016)
Building Bridges (end date: 2016)
Community Parents Programme (end date: 2016)
Connecting Parents (end date: 2016)
Five to Thrive (end date: 2016)
Incredible Years (end date: 2015)
Mellow Parenting (end date: 2015)
Sunshine & Stories (end date: 2016)
Fathers Reading Every Day (FRED) (end date: June 2019)
Being a Parent (January 2020)

‘Our job is to help parents give their children a better start in life. We know how hard it can be to bring up a young family when times are tough, so our projects focus on the things we know work best for young children. Things like good diet, learning to talk/socialise and creating a great relationship between parent and child.

Sometimes we work directly with children, sometimes our work starts before they are born. But we don’t work alone, part of our job is to get everyone working better together, including parents, community organisations, the council and the NHS.’

Alex Khaldi, Partnership Board Chair, A Better Start Southend