Social Value UK

Tag: housing associations

  • Trafford Housing Trust’s Tom Wilde honoured for commitment to social value

    Trafford Housing Trust’s Tom Wilde honoured for commitment to social value

    Tom Wilde, Trafford Housing Trust’s Social Value Advisor and Social Value UK member, has been honoured for his commitment to serving the local community at the Social Value Awards. The Social Value Awards, in association with Department for Culture, Media and Sport, took place at London’s Institute of Engineering Technology on Wednesday 8th February and provided an opportunity to celebrate good practice in commissioning and providing social value. The awards relate to the 2012 Social Value Act, which called for all public sector bodies to consider social, economic and environmental benefits to local communities, rather than just cost, when awarding contracts to public services.

    At the ceremony, Tom took home one of the four available prizes on the night, winning the Social Value Leadership Award for an Individual, a category which recognises the work of someone in an organisation that goes beyond the requirements of the Social Value Act, and who is instrumental in leading and engaging others in social value. Tom was up against two other nominees for the award, Brian Bishop from Data Performance Consultancy Ltd. and Cindy Nadesan from Surrey and East Sussex Council.

    It’s amazing to get national recognition for a job that I truly love doing. I’m really lucky to work for an organisation that believes in social value enough that they have created a full-time position that focuses on it.

    Tom’s award was in honour of his work analysing local needs to understand what support or interventions will deliver greatest social value within Trafford, and his key role in the re-design of the Trust’s procurement processes which ensured social value is embedded through the supply chain. Tom has also played a key role in supporting local businesses to align their CSR and social value activities more closely with the projects and organisations which will deliver greatest local impact while also leveraging support from local partners and businesses to address local needs.

    Tom said: “It’s amazing to get national recognition for a job that I truly love doing. I’m really lucky to work for an organisation that believes in social value enough that they have created a full-time position that focuses on it. Getting this award will increase the Trust’s profile as an organisation that champions social value, which in turn will open doors to work with and influence others and spread social value beyond the public sector.”

    Matthew Gardiner, chief executive of Trafford Housing Trust, added: “Tom is fully deserving of this award and it is fitting recognition of the excellent work he has undertaken since joining the Trust. The Trust has long been a champion of the importance of social value, as evidenced by our social enterprise CleanStart, and Tom’s award is further proof that the Trust is at the forefront of public bodies that are committed to awarding contracts that result in positive social outcomes as well as excellent results.”

    The award ceremony was the climax of the fourth annual Social Value Summit, the leading event in its field, attracting over 300 leaders from across the private, public and social sectors. It is organised by Social Enterprise UK and Interserve, supported by Business in the Community.

  • Social Value and Procurement

    Social Value and Procurement

    This is a guest blog by organisational members HACT on social value and procurement. This is part of the Member Exchange Series. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

     

    HACT launches toolkit

    Housing associations have long been committed to improving the communities they work in, providing opportunities for residents in the form of employment, training, skills and broader health and wellbeing activity. As community investment budgets are increasingly scrutinised, housing providers will look to core activities to drive social value. Procurement is central to this, but established models – heavily reliant on apprenticeships – are unsuitable for all contracts, nor are housing associations satisfied that the social value promised at tender stage is monitored or measured to validate delivery. Likewise, contractors committed to delivering social value are often uncertain what housing providers wanted – how is ‘social value’ defined, and what outcomes are of most interest?

    To address this, the Social Value and Procurement toolkit was created by HACT, supported by Trowers & Hamlins LLP and echelon Consultancy Ltd. To ensure the final guidance responded to challenges and answered critical questions, we convened a working group of housing providers and supply chain organisations (Affinity Sutton, North Hertfordshire Homes, Riverside, Thrive, Wandle, Mulalley, AkzoNobel, United Living, Wates and the Northern Housing Consortium). This vanguard supported and shaped the development of the toolkit, ensuring it was relevant, practical and easily applicable.

    The toolkit provides end-to-end guidance for both housing providers and contractors on how to most effectively and efficiently generate social value through the procurement process, alongside legal guidance and a plethora of practical tools, from example wording for tenders and contracts to templates and checklists.

     

    What next?

    With the toolkit now published, what’s next? There are four areas we’ll be focusing on:

    First, and testament to the toolkit’s usefulness, beyond the original supporters a good number of further organisations have adopted it: Catalyst, Circle (now part of Clarion Group), Fusion 21, Genesis, Liverpool Mutual homes, mhs Homes, Places for People, Viridian, Keepmoat and Mitie.

    Second, HACT is delighted to have these organisations on board and we are continuing to promote the role of procurement in generating social value. HACT staff have taken part in a number of events recently, and we were delighted to be invited to speak with members of Social Value UK at the 2016 Social Value Members Exchange. Additionally, HACT has hosted a series of well attended masterclasses for contractors and housing providers, which will continue in 2017.

    Third, although much of the previous engagement on social value and procurement has been around repairs and maintenance, following publication there has been significant interest in applying the toolkit to a wider range of goods and services. Further, a number of exciting discussions are underway, exploring opportunities for implementing the toolkit beyond housing. These avenues of further work offer great potential to begin firmly embedding social value across a range of housing and non-housing procurements.

    Lastly, over the next year HACT will continue working with organisations, individually and collectively, promoting the importance of effectively delivering social value through procurement, providing packages of support to unlock the full potential for social value generation.

     

    Want more information? Contact rob.allen@hact.org.uk or william.howard@hact.org.uk.

  • New SROI Case Study: Trafford Housing Trust

    New SROI Case Study: Trafford Housing Trust

    SROI is used across a wide range of different sectors, countries and geographies. One area which has seen an increased take up of SROI is the housing sector. Trafford Housing Trust (THT) has been at the forefront of this and Dr Jennifer Hall, their Innovation Lead, won the ESRC prize for Outstanding Early Career Impact last year for the work she has done in improving social change through measuring, monitoring and evaluating social impact.

    We spoke to Jeni to find out more.

    Why are you using SROI and how did you go about it?

    THT is a profit for purpose organisation; the money that we earn is intended to deliver social impact, so we feel a strong need to prove and improve the impact that we’re creating. Value for money is also a motivating factor, as for most housing associations, but it’s not as important as our desire to improve services.

    Within THT, we have selected a few different projects on which to apply the principles of SROI. So far we have used SROI on an ad hoc sheltered housing scheme, our social enterprise CleanStart, and executed an SROI forecast on a new development programme. This process has helped us to articulate and justify why these projects are important, and why we should direct resources towards them.

    We also recently started a social value audit projection using SROI, which will be a really exciting project.

    Has SROI been useful? Have you changed anything as a result of SROI?

    Yes, SROI has been really useful for us in lots of ways.

    Firstly, SROI has helped us to improve our understanding of exactly what we do and our impact. Traditionally, housing associations have kept with a ‘feel good’ approach – SROI means that we now have an evidence basis for the work that we do.

    Secondly, for CleanStart, SROI has given us a competitive advantage because it helps us to engage in the bidding process. Businesses are coming to us because of our findings through SROI.

    Thirdly, SROI helps us to make investment decisions, for example in the SROI forecast we did for our regeneration project. Because using SROI means that we can be more certain of the outcomes that we’ll generate, and therefore make more outcomes-focussed decisions.

    However, the biggest change that SROI has made is in understanding internally within the organisation. SROI provides us with an explanation of why we’re doing what we’re doing, and has helped to effect a change from a focus on outputs to outcomes. This also means that we have a better working environment – the process of delivering social impact is rewarding, and when we can see clear evidence of this, it improves the experience of both staff and communities.

     

    Our full collection of case studies can be viewed here.

  • SROI Case Study: Link Group

    SROI Case Study: Link Group, Scotland

    You can download a pdf of this case study here.

    Link Group is one of Scotland’s leading housing, regeneration and support organisations, providing services to 10,000 families and individuals in 26 Scottish local authority areas.

    Sheila Maxwell, Link’s Community Regeneration Officer and an SROI Accredited Practitioner, explains the varied ways that they use SROI across Link’s activities to help them improve their services and win contracts.

    1. What does your organisation do?

    Link Group is a registered social landlord and social enterprise offering a wide range of housing, support and regeneration services for individuals, families and communities, with our activities mainly concentrated in the central belt of Scotland.
    We were formed in 1962 to provide housing for rent to those on low incomes and for people with specific housing needs including the elderly and people with disabilities. 53 years on, Link Group now operates in a variety of areas including:

    • community regeneration services such as employability and financial and digital inclusion
    • tenancy support services
    • local and Scottish Government contracts including care and repair services, private sector leasing, Help to Buy (Scotland) and Help to Adapt
    2. Why are you using SROI and how did you go about it?

    Our involvement with SROI goes back to 2008. Our original interest in SROI stemmed from the Scottish Government and their SROI project. We felt that we wanted to be able to demonstrate additional impact of our services, not just on a ‘cost benefit’ level, and then potentially use this to improve our service delivery and develop partnerships with identified stakeholders. SROI seemed like a good option.
    After going on the practitioner training course, I conducted my first SROI analysis on Link’s Older Persons’ Advice Project. During this experience, the mentoring I received from Sheila Durie, another accredited practitioner in Scotland, was invaluable. This was all back in the early days of SROI – we didn’t even have the Guide to SROI to help us when we started the process!
    Since then I have written a couple of other assured reports, and completed analyses on other areas of our work.

    3. Has SROI been useful? Have you changed anything as a result of SROI?

    Definitely! It’s been very useful for Link Group, its customers and stakeholders.

    i. Funding and contracts
    We have discovered different dimensions to our service delivery that we were not previously aware of. This has then given us access to other funding sources and new partnership relationships. For example, intermediate outcomes that we identified on the Older Persons Advice Project were used to then gain additional funding.
    Other SROIs have been useful as they help us to develop bids and funding applications.

    ii. Changed decision making
    It’s probably true that the original reason we engaged in SROI was to help us to gain access to funding and confidently demonstrate our positive social impact to stakeholders. However, it’s actually been incredibly useful in helping us to evaluate and improve our services by informing key decisions about delivery.
    For example, SROI has helped us with assumptions about our stakeholders. An SROI we conducted on our RealLiving Befriending Service in West Fife (a service to help older people including those affected by dementia) found that the service actually made an equally significant difference to the carer of the client, as to the client themselves. This helped us to change the way we thought about this particular service.
    A different example is from when we did an SROI report on Care and Repair services in West Lothian in 2013. One of the big realisations was that we needed to improve our relationship with the NHS and partnerships with other health and social care providers.

    iii. General Monitoring and Evaluation practices
    We have adopted some principles of SROI in our monitoring and evaluation practices. We ask questions about baselines as a standard part of our initial customer engagement, and include questions about ‘difference made’, rather than just outputs. I believe this has improved the quality of our surveys and feedback across large areas of Link.

    iv. External Communications (reputation)
    We’ve also found that using SROI has given us an enhanced reputation as a sector innovator – we’ve been involved in promotion of SROI at workshops and events across Scotland and beyond, including the National Australian Housing Conference in Brisbane and Citizens Advice Scotland Conference.

    v. Internal Communications
    One other less obvious benefit is the difference that SROI reports have made to staff morale. After being involved in the production of an SROI, stakeholder engagement or reading the analysis and case studies afterwards, staff feel less like a cog in a wheel; it puts them more in touch with the difference that they are making on the ground.
    SROI also helps to spread information about our services to other parts of Link group – incredibly useful for an organisation of our size and diversity.

    4. What would you do differently next time?

    A few pieces of advice I’d give to others:

    • Be clear with all concerns about scope, audience and purpose of SROI report before you start
    • When thinking about the above, always factor in extra time for stakeholder involvement. We often assumed that would be equally easy to involve stakeholders across services – in practice this wasn’t true. The nature of the service will influence how easy it is to engage with family members and other stakeholders
    • If you’re new to SROI, get mentoring support or at least peer support
    • You don’t necessarily have to do a full SROI report. Think about which elements are most important to help you to understand your stakeholders and the way they interact with your service.