We've taken a year to get this right - a strategy for change that will bring about real change.

The Ipswich Social Mobility Alliance was born out of the collaboration of organisations on the Ipswich Opportunity Area (IOA) - a 5 year government-funded programme focused on social mobility that ran from 2017-2022.

It brought much needed investment into our town, particularly into education providers from nurseries through to schools and colleges and our University.

The IOA programme achieved a number of positive outcomes, and we felt shifts in behaviours that might not have happened without that work, but we knew it was collaboration and shared focus that has the real power to effect change. 

Collaboration around a single sector and funding source, with a set of planned outcomes and performance indicators, keeps us focused, and we have lots of great projects that are doing just that across the town. But we know that if we want to focus on place and dismantling systemic barriers to equity, we need to come together and work holistically, crossing sectors, funding streams and established relationships. 

The ISMA isn't a programme, project or organisation. It is an Alliance of organisations working with and for children and young people and their families, bringing all of our connections to projects, programmes, sectors and ambitions together to gain far greater value from each. We challenge ourselves to work upstream - getting to the source of inequality and barriers to children's best possible futures - and making the necessary changes within our practices, individual strategies and the ways that we work together.

We also bring together the power of youth - we all have the capacity to share power with young people, to give them the space to build their place and their future. And when we enable them to bring their voices and their actions and ambitions together, we support them to repair and restore the connections between every part of the ecosystem around them.

25 years can seem at once ambitious and not ambitious. It is a clear message to young people - we have seen things come and go, but now our organisations are in it for the long game. We will match your acts of leadership with acts of our own, and we are rising to the challenge now.