Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity
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The challenge
Roald Dahl’s Marvellous Children’s Charity (RDMCC) is a nationwide charity that supports seriously ill children and their families – founded by the widow of the famous children’s author who gave his name to the charity. RDMCC came to NPC when they were at a crossroads. They wanted to put seriously ill children at the heart of everything they do and maximise their limited resources by measuring their impact. We worked closely with them to create a child-focused vision, mission and values and then built on this to produce an organisational theory of change.
The approach
NPC worked with RDMCC to understand what they had done historically, then we examined the current situation and used this as a basis for a workshop design. We then worked with the board of trustees to redesign their vision, mission and values to reflect their focus on seriously ill children. Once we had reached consensus on this, we convened a mix of RDMCC’s internal and external stakeholders (including staff, trustees, parents of seriously ill children, Roald Dahl NHS specialist nurses and a funder) and began to guide the charity through the theory of change process. NPC then synthesised the outputs from the workshops and produced an organisational theory of change and an accompanying narrative for the organisation to use.
The result
RDMCC found the process extremely helpful and the theory of change has given them clarity and focus on what they need to achieve. It has enabled them to put seriously ill children at the heart of what they do and build from there. The charity is now using the theory of change as a basis for its new strategy, and are already using it as the framework for the measurement and evaluation of its programmes in the near future.
NPC provided the sounding board and the facilitation we needed. Their constructive questioning and useful suggestions gave us added confidence to push forward with this work.
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