Our grants programme to support organisational strengthening provided finance to help agencies respond to changes and pressures in their operating environment and to improve the effectiveness of their service delivery. Funding was available for:
- organisational or service-level reviews or restructuring
- developing ways for agencies to work together to improve service delivery and reduce costs (partnerships, collaboration, mergers)
- responding to unexpected changes in the external environment (e.g. legislation, policy or funding)
- developing ways of becoming a more sustainable organisation.
These grants were designed to be developmental, helping an organisation overcome a particular problem, rise to a new challenge or consolidate its operations in a more sustainable way. Funding was not normally available for regular, ongoing staff costs or for direct project related costs. We looked for clear indications that the grant support would strengthen the organisation in its delivery of quality services to homeless or potentially homeless people.
During the year we provided eight grants at a total value of £95,000 under this element of the programme. As can be seen from the list below, support for mergers and collaboration featured strongly in this:
- Grove Housing: £12,500 for assistance in finding a merger partner
- Centrepoint: £20,000 for consolidation following a merger with Stopover
- Kings Cross Homelessness Project: £18,000 to develop a collaboration with Shelter
- Ashiana Project: £20,000 for the development and practical implementation of an IT strategy
- Afro-Caribbean HA: £2,000 for consultancy support in business planning
- Turnaround Newham: £13,000 for support to cover an unprogrammed deficit and prepare for a period of rapid expansion of services
- Turnaround E1: £2,000 for consultancy support in business planning
- Ten Feet Away: £7,500 for international bursaries.
The Impact Programme was an important feature of the Foundation’s organisational strengthening activities. This is an educational, technical assistance and training programme that addresses aspects of the work of homelessness agencies, developing and disseminating knowledge and good practice.
During the year, the core elements of the Impact Programme were:
- The Outcomes Programme. Since 2001/02 we have provided assistance to a wide range of agencies to raise standards of outcome monitoring and this remained an important stream of work in 2006/07. One of the key events during the year was to develop a framework for outcome measurement that could be applied for Supporting People (SP). This involved working closely with six homelessness agencies, three local authorities and the CLG to explore and identify the most appropriate way of recording SP outcomes that would simultaneously meet the requirements of all of these. The resulting model was accepted by the CLG as the basis on which it promoted outcome measurement for SP throughout the country.
Through the consultants employed to lead the outcomes work (Triangle Consulting) we have also updated and improved the main management tool for measuring soft outcomes, the Outcomes Star, including developing special training materials. This has proved enormously popular and the use of the Outcomes Star for direct support of clients is now commonplace.
In view of the volume of information being created by the Foundation to assist agencies in understanding and using outcome monitoring more effectively, we launched in February 2007 a dedicated website: http://www.homelessoutcomes.org.uk. By the end of the year this was already being visited by over 700 distinct users per month.
We are enormously grateful to Sara Burns, Joy Mackeith and Kate Graham of Triangle Consulting, who have done an excellent job of delivering this workstream on our behalf.
- The Leadership Programme. During the year our leadership programme focused primarily on action learning and bursaries. Action Learning Associates delivered on our behalf between five and seven action learning sets at any one time. Individuals in each set had common positions or interests (e.g. a set for HR managers, one for heads of smaller agencies, one for IT managers) as this has been found to strengthen the outcomes obtained. Under the bursary programme for international travel the Foundation made two ‘reverse bursary’ awards - for people from overseas to visit London.
- Beyond a Helpline. The beginning of 2006/07 saw the start of Beyond a Helpline, our initiative to develop high quality HR practices within smaller homelessness agencies. This arose from a year of preparatory work with a number of smaller agencies in 2005/06. Broadway Homelessness and Support was commissioned (under competitive tender) to deliver this programme to 11 smaller agencies. Participating agencies receive support in developing and implementing the full range of HR policies and procedures, with appropriate training, as well as an audit of their HR practice, surgeries and a helpline, with a dedicated account manager.
The programme has demonstrated considerable achievements in improving the standards of HR within the agencies involved. It is a two-year pilot that will complete at the end of 2007/08. We have commissioned an independent contemporaneous evaluation and the results of this will be disseminated widely to promote learning. A special website www.beyondahelpline.org.uk (no longer available) was developed for agencies participating in the initiative and others can find out more about the scheme and later will be able to access the evaluation on this site.
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Mergers. Under the organisational strengthening grants programme we provided a number of grants to assist smaller, vulnerable agencies find a merger partner. Building on this work, we also commissioned the preparation of an online guide to the literature related to mergers. This is available to assist such agencies in exploring their first steps in considering whether a merger is appropriate for them. Our thanks to Alan Cripps and Mary Carter for their work in developing this guide. Download: Mergers: A Brief Guide to the Literature for Voluntary and Community Sector Organisations
During 2006/07 total spending on the Impact Programme amounted to £195,502 of external costs and £70,647 of internal allocated resources making a total of £266,149 (2006: £198,184).
To continue to read our annual review for 2007 go to the next page - Private Rented Sector (PRS) Programme or click on the links below
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