Governance
Focusing Minds CIC is a community-focused organisation dedicated to improving the mental health, wellbeing, personal development, and life opportunities of children, young people, families, and communities. We provide support across education, coaching, mentoring, neurodiversity, emotional wellbeing, and personal development, placing the needs of those we serve at the heart of everything we do.
As a Community Interest Company (CIC), our purpose is to create positive and lasting social impact. We are committed to operating with integrity, transparency, accountability, and professionalism in all areas of our work.
Our Commitment to Good Governance
We believe strong governance is essential to delivering safe, effective, and meaningful support. Our governance framework is built around the following principles:
Community Benefit: Ensuring our activities create measurable positive outcomes for children, young people, families, schools, and communities.
Safeguarding First: Prioritising the safety, wellbeing, and rights of those we support.
Transparency and Accountability: Being open about our decisions, finances, policies, and impact.
Inclusion and Equity: Promoting equality of opportunity and celebrating diversity, including neurodiversity.
Professional Excellence: Maintaining high standards of practice, continuous learning, and reflective improvement.
Collaboration: Working in partnership with schools, families, professionals, and community organisations to achieve the best outcomes.
Leadership and Strategic Oversight
Focusing Minds CIC is led by its Directors, who are responsible for the organisation’s strategic direction, legal compliance, financial stewardship, and achievement of our social purpose.
The Directors oversee:
- Strategic planning and organisational development
- Financial management and sustainability
- Safeguarding and risk management
- Quality assurance and service evaluation
- Compliance with relevant legislation and regulatory requirements
- Monitoring social impact and community benefit
Regular reviews of policies, procedures, and organisational performance ensure that our services remain safe, effective, and responsive to the needs of our beneficiaries.
Discover more about our director team here.
Safeguarding and Wellbeing
The welfare of children and young people is fundamental to our work. We maintain robust safeguarding policies and procedures that reflect current legislation and best practice guidance. All staff and associates are expected to uphold these standards and contribute to a culture where safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility.
We are committed to creating environments where individuals feel safe, respected, valued, and empowered to reach their potential.
Quality and Professional Standards
We strive to deliver services that are evidence-informed, person-centred, and outcome-focused. We continually review and evaluate our work through stakeholder feedback, reflective practice, training, and ongoing professional development.
Our approach recognises the unique strengths, experiences, and needs of each individual, particularly those experiencing mental health challenges, barriers to education, or the impacts of neurodiversity.
Financial Responsibility
As a Community Interest Company, we are committed to managing our resources responsibly and transparently. Any surplus generated is reinvested into the organisation to further our social objectives, strengthen our services, and increase our impact within the communities we serve.
Appropriate financial controls, monitoring systems, and reporting processes are in place to ensure accountability and good stewardship of all funds received.
Measuring Our Impact
We are committed to understanding and demonstrating the difference our work makes. Through monitoring, evaluation, and stakeholder feedback, we assess the impact of our services on wellbeing, confidence, resilience, emotional health, engagement, and personal development.
These insights help us improve our services and ensure we continue to meet the needs of the individuals, families, schools, and communities we support.
Our Promise
Focusing Minds CIC is committed to delivering services that are safe, ethical, inclusive, and impactful. Through strong governance and a clear social purpose, we aim to empower individuals to thrive, overcome challenges, and achieve positive outcomes in education, wellbeing, and life.
Our Directors
-
- Andrew
-
- Drew
-
- Nick
Andrew is responsible for service provision, organisation finances and general day to day running of Focusing Minds CIC. He combines his director responsibilities with that of delivering services.
Drew is responsible for public relations and ensuring the smooth running of communications. He also has growing responsibility for funding applications and tenders.
Nick is responsible for safeguarding, reviewing our policy and ensuring staff and associates are recruited under safer recruitment guidelines. He also maintains our safeguarding log and is deputy DSL at Focusing Minds CIC.
Safeguarding
In the UK, safeguarding means protecting peoples’ health, wellbeing and human rights, and enabling them to live free from harm, abuse and neglect.
In our sector, we understand it to mean protecting people, particularly children and young people, from harm. This harm may arise from staff or volunteers of Focusing Minds or be delivered via a child or young person’s disclosure.
Safeguarding applies consistently and without exception across our services and staff. It requires proactively identifying, preventing and guarding against all risks of significant harm, exploitation and abuse and having mature, accountable and transparent systems for response, reporting and learning when risks materialise. Those systems must be survivor-centred and also protect those accused until proven guilty.
We believe everyone has the responsibility to promote the welfare of all young people and to practice in a way that protects them. We give equal priority to keeping all children, young people and other service users safe regardless of age, disability, gender, race, religion, belief or sexual orientation.
As part of our commitment to safeguarding those we work with, we:
Have a robust safeguarding policy outlining our procedures.
Maintain a safeguarding log of disclosures and relevant actions taken.
Ensure that staff and/or associates are recruited utilising safer recruitment guidelines.
Continue to develop links with other local organisations, ensuring best practice is shared.
You can discover more about our safeguarding practice and commitments by visiting our dedicated safeguarding page or view our policy.