About us
The Boingboing Foundation (the Foundation) is an exciting new charity established to add to the scope and impact of work focused on social justice rooted resilience research and practice. Whilst the Foundation is independent of Boingboing Resilience CIC (the social enterprise), it will unite with it and its collaborators, to advance the concept of resilience defined as ‘beating the odds whilst also changing the odds’. The Foundation’s resilience research and practice will prioritise ideas and applications that go beyond essential support for individuals, and identify ways in which the environment people live in can better support them, and reduce their difficulties in the first place. This is important to us because there is much evidence demonstrating how mental health is negatively impacted by experiences of inequality and discrimination.
Our public benefit and impact
The Foundation has been established with the charitable objects of:
- Creating opportunities for young people, particularly those facing social disadvantage, and their communities to make resilient moves and improve their wellbeing
- Advancing resilience related education and understanding through capacity raising programmes and creating new knowledge through co-produced research
- Promoting equality and diversity
We are doing this through our focus on co-research and activism projects. This work centres young people facing multiple systemic disadvantage in sectors where we are usually ignored, but where our voices are essential for socially-just systems change.
This work benefits individuals, communities and wider society. Our work enables young people and our allies to (as a few examples) to build our own resilience, so we are better equipped to navigate challenges that arise in our lives. We learn new skills, find belonging with safe people and places, plan and organise, solve problems, have a laugh, take responsibility, build hope and positivity, foster talents, meet our basic needs, feel valued, have our say and be heard about issues that are important to us and our communities. This individual benefit cascades to a collective benefit, as more community members acquire the skills, knowledge and understanding to support community resilience building, increasing participation and engagement in community development and civic action, improving collective health and wellbeing, and reducing the need for specialist support and intervention such as mental health services.
The ultimate aim of our co-research and activism projects is for young people to challenge and influence the unfair structures we navigate, creating systems which are more effective, supportive, equitable and better able to meet people’s needs. This reduces the adversity and disadvantage that communities are facing, reducing the need to be resilient in the first place, and empowering people to bounce forward from hard times.
As we promote and model ways to undertake inclusive research and practice and disseminate this in accessible way to the public, wider society will benefit from increased understanding and ideas about how to reduce discrimination. Communities will benefit from the involvement and insight of a greater diversity of people in opportunities such as, training, policy, and service design and delivery. The Foundation also believes that its purposes and activities will benefit the general public and society as a whole, because everyone benefits from a world in which equality and diversity are promoted and in which those from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups are better represented and provided for throughout society.
Beneficiaries of the Foundation’s work will be:
- Young people and their allies facing multiple systemic disadvantage: through opportunities to co-produce resilience resources, initiate and collaborate on social activism projects and challenge existing service responses to drive and inform service improvements.
- Practitioners and academics: through continuous and progressive opportunities to develop their understanding and practice of how confronting systemic challenges can be an essential component of individual resilience, working in a co-productive way to enable their practice and systems to be challenged and changed.
- Communities: through the wider benefits of achieving greater resilience throughout communities which face systemic disadvantages.
Our Governance
The Boingboing Foundation became a registered charity with the Charity Commission for England and Wales (Charity number: 1194676) in June 2021 and a registered company limited by guarantee (Company number: 13384036). The Charity is established to advance knowledge in, and practical application of, ideas associated with the concept of resilience.
The initial trustees of the charity are:
- Caroline Taylor-Beswick (Chair); a qualified social worker and youth and community development worker with experience of working within the public, charitable and social enterprise sectors. Caroline’s interests are in Children’s Rights and social justice, and the democratisation of knowledge.
- Dr Francisca Farache Aureliano da Silva; an academic and Principal Lecturer within a research focussed university. Francisca’s research interests are in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), CSR communications and Business Ethics.
- Scott Dennis; a qualified accountant with the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA): “As a parent of three adopted children with complex needs, I am excited to be involved as a Trustee for our Foundation. I am a community-based researcher with experience of participatory action research methodologies in resilience and mental health – this means involving everyone affected by the issues we are researching, including young people and parents. Useful for my role as Treasurer, I am a qualified accountant with with over 15 years of experience of financial management. Through both my family life and working life I have seen the importance of not just beating the odds but also changing the odds so that people do not have to keep overcoming the same challenges again and again. As a volunteer Trustee for Boingboing Foundation, I like using my skills and experience to help the organisation grow and develop”.
- Buket Kara is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice and has been a Boingboing volunteer for several years. Buket also brings valued experience from her time as an elected Executive Board member of the Association of Psychologists for Social Solidarity (Turkey) and as the Vice President of the Free Colors LGBTI+ Association (Turkey). Buket has been involved in projects that include acting in solidarity with the oppressed people in society, organising workshops about social equality, as well as campaigns against hate speech and discrimination towards minority groups and gender-based violence – a great fit for the Foundation.
Trustees will prioritise work with, by and for people that face multiple systemic disadvantages. Disadvantages may be due to disability, race, gender, religion, sexuality and/or living in poverty. Trustees recognise the increased risk of developing mental health problems caused by such systemic disadvantage and the benefit to both the individuals and to the wider public that can be created through taking action to address them.
Through our own governance arrangements, we are seeking to proactively address under-representation of certain groups within the charity sector. As a first step, we have listened to and heard the call to action from the Young Trustee Movement, who highlight that less than 3% of charity trustees are under 30. We have ensured our Articles of Association reflect the legal possibility for young people aged 16 years plus to be trustees, have appointed a founding trustee member who is under 30 years, and have identified a Young Trustee Movement Board rep. We recognise there is much more to do one this issue and with other under-represented groups.
Data Protection
Read our Data Protection and Privacy Policy here.
Contact us
Watch our workshops: how to do community co-research on health equity
Created as part of the ongoing Community Solutions for Health Equity project that Boingboing Foundation are proudly part of, we are pleased to share recordings of a series of workshops held recently in Blackpool. These workshops are free resources to be taken advantage of by any community members or organisations looking for a beginner’s guide to developing the research skills and knowledge needed to explore health inequalities in coastal areas.
The Research Ready Communities pilot continued
For the past year and a half Boingboing has been working on a Research Ready Communities pilot project in Blackpool alongside the National Institute for Health Research as part of their Under-served Communities programme. Typically, much of the funding for health research in the UK goes to universities in London, Oxford and Cambridge, but health research is needed the most in places like Blackpool, where the harmful impacts of health inequalities are worst felt.
Activism is for everyone – and it’s essential for building resilience
I stood there on a warm August day with a sense of hope. People of all ages had come together for Make A Change, the inaugural launch event of the Activist Alliance in Blackpool. And it seemed to have come at just the right time. Things seem to be going from bad to...
