Social Economy Scotland DP

The priority themes provide a clear focus for our work and a framework within which pilots are supported.  As such, all pilot projects need to demonstrate a high potential for impact and strong potential for mainstreaming under one or more of these themes.

• Partnership and Procurement
• Access to Finance
• Quality and Impact
• Skills and Professionalism
• Raising the Profile

Target Groups
Social Economy organisations and their staff, public sector agencies and thri staff

Pilot Projects and Mainstreaming Outcomes

 Partnership & Procurement

Renfrewshire Council Voluntary Service - Public Social Partnership - ROAR
The Renfrewshire Befriending pilot worked with voluntary organisations in Renfrewshire to design a befriending service for older adults. They used a public social partnership approach to the design of this service and built a consortium, including voluntary organisations and Renfrewshire Council for the Voluntary Sector (lead partner), WRVS, Alzheimer’s Scotland, Contact the Elderly.  The public partners included Scottish Enterprise Renfrewshire, Renfrewshire local authority -represented by the social work department and the Community Health Partnership. This worked very effectively and in June of this year they launched themselves as ROAR – Reaching Older Adults in Renfrewshire.  Four services were piloted:

• Phone contact initiative
• Sunday-lunch group
• Transport to appointment service and
• Activity based weekly lunch club

This is a “public social partnership”, consisting of a consortium of local voluntary organisations: Renfrewshire CVS (lead partner), Volunteer Centre Renfrewshire, WRVS, Alzheimers Scotland, and Contact the Elderly. The Consortium is delivering services via a Section 10 grant and hopes to bid for public sector contracts in the future. Since the end of the Equal Pilot, Development Officer has been recruited to coordinate the work of the PSP and referrals are now underway. There is much interest in this PSP as a good practice model for mainstreaming and the Chief Executive of RCVS has been promoting the model widely at conferences.

Community Recycling Network Scotland - Public Social Partnership - Homereach
The recycling public social partnership pilot was led by Community Recycling Network Scotland and focused on the joint design of emergency furniture packs for the homeless people – Beulah, RECAP and St Patricks Furniture Project worked with 5 departments of North Lanarkshire Council to design an appropriate service. Housing Dept and the tenancy teams at North Lanarkshire Council were most engaged in the design and referral process. Head of Procurement at North Lanarkshire Council was also instrumental in the pilot process and the process of establishing groundbreaking tender specification which include social clause/s in the contract.

The services piloted were:

• Providing emergency furniture packs for vulnerable or disadvantaged individuals or families who are moving into Council tenancies or when being re-housed or moving from homelessness
• Storage - Storage of items left when an individual or family becomes temporarily homeless until they are re-homed

• Permanent furniture packs for people who are not eligible for Community Care Grants –individuals and families moving into new local authority tenancies who are not eligible for emergency packs or grants which can be spent on household goods but cannot afford to buy furniture can also use the service.  Targeted recruitment and training placements are included in the draft tender specification.
•  Opportunities for people disadvantage in the labour market (e.g homeless) are offered placements

The thematic recycling Public Social Partnership pilot has built a consortium made up of three voluntary organisations – Beulah, RECAP and St. Patrick’s Furniture Project. They have now formed into a new company called Homereach and are delivering emergency furniture packs and furniture storage. They are currently being funded through Housing Department in North Lanarkshire for an interim period but Homereach hope to bid for council contract work which is set to be issued in January 2008. This pilot has made a great impact in the wider arena of procurement and has been taken up as an example of good practice, having been the subject of a parliamentary motion promoting consortium/public social partnership development as the way forward for the procurement agenda

Access to finance

Local Social Economy Partnerships (LSEPs)
A Development Fund supported a wide range of activities for LSEPs including: Meet the Buyer/Trade Fair events, creating a shared Human Resources Service, Payroll Giving, Improving Access to Quality to Quality Bookkeeping. All LSEPs that accessed the development fund participated in a national dissemination event to share good practice and exchange learning.

The work of this pilot will continue after the project end date. Social Investment Scotland are still working with at least two organisations in relation to investments. The work of this pilot and thematic board will inform the role of the new investment fund.

Quality & Impact

North Lanarkshire Council - Developing the social economy in North Lanarkshire
The project delivered a number of bespoke training courses including - ICT Best Practice; Forming and Operating Consortiums; Succession Planning and Funding. Developed a series of 6 briefing papers Developed a Procurement Action Plan

North Lanarkshire Council (NLC) has made significant progress with packaging business support to the childcare sector and has levered in additional funding to mainstream business support as a result. Regeneration Services will seek to secure Early Years funding as part of match funding package for the 2008 – 2011 ERDF.
The completed procurement action plan will be embedded into key departments within NLC and has been supported at a corporate level through NLC procurement.

Forth Sector - Social Return on Investment
Social Return on Investment (SROI) – This pilot is developing and testing approaches to SROI and identifying whether SROI is an applicable model for assessing the impact of investment funding. The project is testing the SROI toolkit with 10 organisations, 10 reports will be published in addition the project will test predictive SROI with a further 4 organisations, 4 reports will be published. Two training days have been arranged for 5/6^th December.

Haldane Associates and Forth Sector disseminated information on SROI at the Social Firms UK conference in Edinburgh in July 2007. Discussions have been ongoing with Social Enterprise Unit in Scottish Government around establishing a programme to deliver SROI evaluations around public service delivery.

Volunteer Development Scotland - Measuring the Impact of Volunteering
This pilot tested the Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit which was developed by the Institute of Volunteering Research. The project developed three local support partnerships in Edinburgh, North Lanarkshire and Highlands, 53 organisations participated in Interactive Seminars on the toolkit and  * beneficiary organisations then continued to use the toolkit.

The Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit has now become part of the mainstream work within Volunteer Development Scotland. Work on assessing the impact of volunteering has now begun in other sectors and Interactive Seminars are now being delivered by the Learning & Practice Development Team within VDS. 4 Roadshows in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Inverness and Dundee highlighting the use of the Toolkit have been delivered. The Scottish Government Directorate for Health and Wellbeing is very keen to get the Volunteering Impact Assessment Toolkit used in Scotland’s NHS and has given financial support to VDS to pilot it with a geographical Board, a specialist Board and a voluntary organisation funded by the NHS. Three beneficiary organisations have built the toolkit into funding applications as a tool for evaluation. The funding applications have subsequently been approved by The Big Lottery and Edinburgh City Council. A Scottish Centre Regeneration (SCR) Learning Point and Profile is being written, based on one of the pilot social economy organisations, which will be published as part of the mainstreaming programme

Business Support

Highlands and Islands Social Enterprise Zone - HISEZ CIC
HISEZ CIC is Scotland’s first Comunity Interest Company. The project aims to provide support to and encourage growth of the social enterprise sector in the Highlands and Islands. The pilot had nine key objectives - Procurement, Business Development Support, Awareness, Conference, Learning, Networking the sector, Research, Policy promotion and monitoring and evaluation.

Post-Equal, HISEZ CIC will continue to deliver hands on business development support to social enterprises and will strive to secure sustainability through trading activities. Future funding for the delivery of services will be on a contract basis with learning from Equal shaping and guiding the new services. The staffing structure under EQUAL has been revised to incorporate the role of Chief Executive Officer to act as both a visible and credible figurehead role for the organisation, and to provide effective project/activity and team management. The CEO role may have positive impacts in lobbying and promoting the CIC to lead to greater success in income generation.

Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition – S2S
S2S, Scotland’s first national Social Enterprise Trade Fair, took place in Perth on 25 April 2006. Fifty social enterprises of all shapes and sizes gathered to sell their goods and services; build new business connections and showcase their products and services. More than 500 delegates from across Scotland attended.

S2S trade to trade conference was a success for the first event of its kind in Scotland.  It achieved a significant profile, attracted a diverse range of delegates and achieved its overall aims with 483 delegates attending.  Post-Equal, the S2S conference has been held twice and is now an established event in the social enterprise calendar.

Development Trust Association Scotland - Enterprise Accelerator
Enterprise Accelerator worked with development trusts to pilot business development support in two different ways as follows;

• A general events programme of training open to development trusts and community groups. This was aimed at stimulating interest in business skills and bringing like minded people together to share ideas. The course topics were:

• risk assessment,
• business planning,
• financial management,
• project management,
• how to run a successful community café.

• A Business Idea Generation programme aimed at those development trusts ready with an idea which they felt could lead to a new business – this involved a business review with a business advisor, an action plan highlighting, priority recommendations and then in-depth one to one support.

The Enterprise Accelerator pilot was very well received by Development Trusts and the evaluation of the work proved that there really was a role for business development support being provided by the Development Trust Association of Scotland (DTAS), rather than development trusts accessing support from another mainstream provider. DTAS are now actively seeking funding and fully expect to continue this programme as part of their mainstream support.

Scottish Enterprise Glasgow - Growing the Social Economy with Graduates
Growing the Social Economy with Graduates pilot enabled social enterprises to have a recent graduate with relevant business skills placed in their organisations. The graduate helped them with specific areas of concern such as producing business plans, devising marketing strategies, and setting up web sites. In the process, the graduates gained work experience and confidence in their own abilities.

The Growing the Social Economy with Graduates pilot was well received by everyone involved. Scottish Enterprise aims to mainstream the work but at the moment it is uncertain how this will happen given changes in the structure and function of Scottish Enterprise and related operations

SCVO - Goodmoves into the social economy
The project developed an infrastructure to encourage individuals with higher level skills, i.e graduates from HE and FE institutions, required to enable the social economy to increase its role in the delivery of high quality services – such as management, IT, marketing, finance skills - , to make the voluntary sector their career destination of choice.

As a result of “goodmoves into the social economy” pilot many new functions have been created for goodmoves. All of these will continue to operate beyond the lifespan of the project. Recent discussions have taken place with our Welsh partners in goodmoves who are keen to benefit form our experiences and also make full use of the new functions on the website.

Community Enterprise Ltd – Trading Up
Trading Up piloted a comprehensive long term support approach to business growth for social economy organisations.  Organisations were helped to move from being dependant on grants to generating their own income.  They did this by developing business and leadership skills, and promoting a change of culture by encouraging entrepreneurship and risk-taking.  In total, they worked with 84 organisations providing: business seminars, skills-building workshops, mentoring support, and networking opportunities. 

The Trading Up pilot was very successful and proved that the comprehensive and integrated support provided was much in demand, especially for those cusp organisations moving from grant dependency to income generation. However, despite a strong commitment to the values and ethos of the work piloted, and a willingness to mainstream this into their normal service deliver, Community Enterprise Lts. are unable to find funding to continue the work piloted through Trading Up.

Raising the Profile

SCVO - Social Economy & Enterprise Database Scotland (SEEDS)
The web-platform allows visitors to search for social economy organisations in Scotland by a variety of parameters, including location, field of work and income size.

The web-platform allows visitors to search for social economy organisations in Scotland by a variety of parameters, including location, field of work and income size. The Social Enterprise Team, Scottish Government, are looking to further develop this database (taking into account the needs of public sector purchasers) as part of the Social Enterprise strategy for Scotland and host it through the social enterprise website “First Port” once finalised.

“Raising the Profile” competition for social enterprises
The intention of this award, sponsored by the then social economy team at Communities Scotland was to promote greater understanding and celebrate the success of individual social enterprises in raising their profile and that of social enterprise in Scotland. The competition was very popular with social enterprises, which were asked to show their use of the Media over a 1-year period. The sponsors of the award, now social enterprise team at Scottish Government, were delighted by the outcome of the competition and are looking to make it an annual event in the social enterprise calendar.

The partnership website www.socialeconomyscotland.info 
During the course of Action 3 the EQUAL team at SCVO has been reviewing and updating the website in order to ensure high quality and user-friendliness. The socialeconomyscotland.info brand is now well-established and there is evidence (site-stats) that the site is being used by a wide variety of stakeholders in the social economy sector. We are now discussing the future of the website and the development/awareness raising function performed by the EQUAL team in relation to the site with the main funders of Action 3, the Third Sector Team at the Scottish Government. We are confident that the TST will want to utilise this resource in relation to the updates Social enterprise strategy 2008 -11 and funding for social enterprise development recently announced in the spending review.