Today, we're excited to announce a new partnership between Nesta, Camden Council and the local NHS to deliver the Family Hubs Pregnancy Grant. This is an innovative scheme providing £500 cash grants to low-income pregnant people, alongside a personalised introduction to local family services. The program will be launched this month as a pilot and will run for one year.

Over the coming months and beyond, we expect to learn a lot as we implement and evaluate this program, specifically:

• what is and isn’t working for families
• what unexpected practical challenges emerge along the way
• whether this approach to supporting families could be adapted and scaled to other communities.

As our team works hard to prepare for the evaluation, we want to reflect on the way Camden Council, Nesta and the local NHS have – and will continue to – work together to make this happen.

As we highlighted in our recent report on Innovation in the early years, local authorities have a unique and vital role to play in early-years innovation and are well positioned to create positive change for families with young children. Collaborative partnerships like ours can leverage this potential while overcoming the capacity and resource constraints that often present barriers to doing things differently.

Building effective cross-organisational partnerships is challenging – especially when bringing together an innovation agency and a local authority with different, though complementary, missions and ways of working. What has made this partnership particularly effective is the clarity of shared goals between our organisations, despite our different roles.

At the heart of this collaboration is a shared commitment to giving children the best start in life. Camden Council focuses on creating healthy estates and neighbourhoods, with particular emphasis on infant health, while Nesta's fairer start mission aims to reduce inequality in early childhood development.

While our missions overlap, our expertise differs. This collaboration bridges the gap between policy, research and local action – combining Nesta's capability in evidence-based programme design and evaluation with Camden's deep understanding of their residents' needs and expertise in service delivery. Together, we're creating a stronger foundation for families through the Family Hubs Pregnancy Grant pilot. This pilot, in turn, forms part of Camden's broader 'Raise Camden' initiative to reduce inequalities and improve outcomes for children in the borough.

Through our joint design work, which included focus groups and interviews with parents, we identified a critical gap in the support system. The support that parents receive in pregnancy and the neonatal period can be fragmented. Many parents told us they did not discover what local support, from Family Hubs and children’s centres, was available until their children were older. This meant that families were missing out on key services, like antenatal classes, parenting support and benefits advice.

In response, we've designed a program that reaches out to families during pregnancy with both financial support and a warm introduction to local services.

One of the key features of this program is the fact that it is proactive – we want to make it as easy as possible for families to receive their grant and learn about local services. But doing this requires a lot of work behind the scenes. For instance, we have had to establish data-sharing protocols that allow Camden Council to identify eligible families without requiring them to apply. The strength of the partnership lies in how our complementary roles have accelerated progress. Our team at Nesta has focused on designing the program and planning the evaluation, which has given the Camden Council team more time to work on the practical steps needed to set up data sharing processes, seek advice from teams across the council and plan for implementation. This parallel workflow has enabled us to collectively achieve more than either partner could have accomplished alone in the same timeframe.

This project exemplifies Nesta's 'think and do' approach to innovation. Rather than simply developing recommendations for others to implement, we're working alongside Camden to design, deliver and evaluate this pilot.

The partnership allows us to combine Camden's deep understanding of their local context and service infrastructure with Nesta's knowledge of evidence on support provided in early childhood, and capabilities in service design, behavioural science and evaluation. Together, we're able to create a pilot that is both evidence-informed and practically implementable within Camden's systems.

Based on our user research, we are confident that this program will benefit families in Camden from day one. But beyond its immediate impact on beneficiaries, this partnership will generate valuable learning about how to implement proactive support systems that effectively reach families during pregnancy. And by rigorously evaluating the program, we'll develop insights that can inform similar approaches across the UK.

As the project progresses, we'll continue to share our learning about both the pilot itself and the partnership approach that made it possible. We believe that these kinds of collaborative relationships between national organisations and local authorities are essential for creating meaningful change for families with young children and ensuring that learnings from local programs are disseminated broadly.