Carers Leeds Strategy (April 2022-March 2025)
Overall objectives
Strategic Principles
Our strategy is underpinned by five strategic principles, which will guide all our work:
- To reach more, and more diverse, carers
- To start with carers’ strengths and skills, working with carers to improve their own lives, rather than doing for or to carers
- to communicate and engage earlier: working preventively or on the cusp of crisis rather than once carers are already in crisis
- To provide direct in formation, advice and support to carers and work to influence others to act to benefit the lives of carers
- To be more intentional. Decide what we want to do, based on what carers tell us and tested through our strategy criteria and seek funding to do it
Carers are people who look after a relative or friend who otherwise couldn’t manage without their help. Carers Leeds works with adult and parent carers across the city. We want to help carers access the resources they need to carry out their caring role; mitigate the negative impact of caring; enjoy life beyond their caring role and have good health and wellbeing, social connections and financial security.
Our service model
To put our strategic principles into practice, we will keep the core aspects of our service model but we will need to change and adapt our information, advice and support. This will include more community focused delivery, a mix of universal and specialist support and more time and resource into earlier contact with carers and carers groups, combined with more intensive 1:1 support for carers where it is most needed. We will continue to offer Time for Carers grants, befriending and support with digital inclusion within our core service.
In addition to our core service, we will design and deliver a programme of activities, learning and support which is carer specific and based on carers needs.
Influencing others
We aim to encourage professionals to make high quality referrals to Carers Leeds and to influence them to act directly to benefit carers. We will be guided by the Leeds Carers Partnership Strategy and we will grow our voice and influence with our priority stakeholders: Adult social care; Primary and Secondary healthcare; and Employers.
Our strategy also has four key pillars that will cut across everything we do: