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:
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:
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:
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 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 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.
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).
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