State and charities must pool resources

This year, I also noticed a pattern: many of the programmes would have once been part of the normal range of services provided in a local area. Now they are exceptional not just because of their quality, but because they have survived. They have flourished despite, for example, a fall in spending on youth services from £48 per pupil in 2015 to £32 today, or a drop in council spending on early help services by 40 per cent between 2010/11 and 2015/16.

While local authorities struggle to meet demand, often valiantly maintaining excellent services and somehow protecting them from the worst of the cuts, it is left to voluntary organisations to pick up the pieces.

This partnership has been successful with state and voluntary sector organisations playing to their strengths - one providing the universal services designed to support the majority of citizens, the other targeting support to those most at risk of falling through the gaps. However, what happens when these gaps get so large that significant numbers of children and families fall through?

Data from the End Child Poverty Campaign suggests that in some constituencies, more than half of children are living in poverty. These children are growing up in temporary accommodation, they are turning up to class having not eaten since yesterday's school dinner, when school holidays mean visits to the food bank and worrying about mum's ability to cope. Already charities are providing emergency aid. In one excellent initiative, school staff have raised funds to provide meals not just for pupils but their entire families to stop them going hungry outside term time throughout the year.

The voluntary sector itself faces a highly volatile and uncertain future. Government grants and contracts are shrinking rapidly, and competition for other sources of funding is fierce. Charities often live hand-to-mouth, paralysed by short-term funding. There is a serious risk that many won't survive and the services we provide - often no longer complementing other support but the only thing left - will die with us.

We cannot continue to rely on 20th Century charitable models, but need to come up with new ways to work together, to pool our resources, share our knowledge and reinforce each other's best endeavours so we can once again become the strong and reliable safety net for those children, young people and their families that most need us.

People working for the just-about-coping voluntary and statutory sectors are coming up with ingenuous ways to offer support, highly attuned to the needs of children growing up in today's families. Meanwhile, numerous families, experts in their own lives, are finding innovative ways to survive and thrive, supporting each other in their own communities. These are the people who should guide the future, and these are the people that the CYP Now Awards rightly celebrate.

• Anna Feuchtwang is chief executive at National Children's Bureau