Succeeding in leadership: Community participation at the heart of decision-making
Case study
August 2014
Contents
Introduction 3
Background 3
Leadership vision 6
Model choice 8
Testing time 8
Building up credibility in the community 11
Early board challenges 13
Local representation 13
Working in partnership 19
Staff accountability 21
Service delivery accountability and governance 25
The children’s centre 27
Conclusion 31
Introduction
This case study focuses on:
· the chair of the board of a children’s centre community mutual
· how a vision was developed of local community representation and decision-making at the highest possible level, and how the appropriate governance was chosen and implemented to achieve this
It relates how:
· parental trust and engagement through integrated board representation and service user membership were facilitated
· the credibility and ownership of the social enterprise model in the local and wider community was established
· the necessary consensus was obtained through evidence-based strategy amongst statutory partners, service commissioners, funders and other key stakeholders
The case study also illustrates the development of the board and the senior management team through governance to:
· manage accountability at strategic and operational levels, ensuring a focus on outcomes for service users and providing services that represent value for money and meet the highest quality standards
· embed a culture of achievement, flexibility and inclusiveness to support the professional development and training of all staff and awareness training of board members
Background
Merry Well Children’s Centre Partnership is a community mutual. It was incorporated as a not-for-profit social enterprise in 2005 and began operating a year later, having moved into a purpose-built centre in 2003.
It grew out of a Sure Start local programme launched in 2000 and was designated a children’s centre in 2004. It serves an isolated urban district that has historically high levels of unemployment and intergenerational worklessness, with domestic violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and antisocial behaviour.
Falling in the top 20% of the country’s most deprived areas – and including two lower super output areas (LSOAs) that rank amongst the top 10% – more than 40% of children, from birth to 4 years, live in households reliant on workless benefits, while just over 46% are classed as living in poverty. The community is mainly White British, although it has become more diverse with the arrival of predominantly Polish and Turkish families.
Currently, there are 792 children aged 0 to 4 in the catchment area, a rise on the previous year. However, the overall centre registration level of 85% has been maintained, and it is notable that, in the two LSOAs, 81% and 94% of children in this age range are registered with the centre.
Services delivered from the centre come under four service wings, comprising:
· childcare services - 50-place nursery, 24-place out-of-school club and 610 crèche places for 264 children
· children’s centre services - commissioned by the county council and delivered through the community outreach team
· community gardens and allotment programme - delivered district-wide from an adjacent site, across age groups
· facilities - accommodation for NHS and community mutual staff; includes co-location for health visitors, midwives, adult speech and language and community paediatric services; lettings are also available
The inclusive nature of Merry Well’s children’s centre provision, whilst targeting and maintaining focus on the most vulnerable families, earned it an ‘outstanding’ rating across all 19 descriptors in its Ofsted inspection.
The same qualities that the centre demonstrates to the local community and beyond - “support, care and advice” - is also directed at staff (87% of whom live in the district) according to a recent Investors in People review report, and has resulted in the community mutual achieving Investors in People recognition for the last 10 years.
The fact that the centre has engendered trust and ownership amongst initially distrustful families, and become a popular hub in the district, is testament to the way in which the community mutual model has supported the engagement of local people and the governance and leadership – driven by the chair of the board, Juliette – that underpin it.
Leadership vision
Juliette’s vision for Merry Well is user focused and outcomes based:
“Why offer a service that you aren’t sure people need? You must first find out what people want and need or else there is no point in providing it.”
Juliette
The quote above lies at the heart of Juliette’s thinking. Moreover, she believes it is vital to adapt the organisation to its users, rather than expecting them to adapt to it, so as to be responsive and flexible in the face of constant change.
For example, when the centre held meetings with statutory agencies in the early days, the only way to ensure local community participation was if the children of the parent representatives came too. So they did, says Charlotte, a member of the management executive:
“This may be commonplace now, but at the time it was groundbreaking.”
Currently, faced with a probable enlargement of its catchment area, an expanded intake to include children up to 11 years and a further cut in children’s centre funding from the county council, Juliette believes Merry Well needs to be even more sharply focused on outcomes.
“I’m not suggesting the year ahead will be comfortable, but my view is that our safety lies in delivering outcomes. The issue is not so much about structures, which in my experience are constantly changing, but how much of what we provide already will continue to be commissioned and what the specification will look like.”
Juliette
Charlotte, the monitoring evaluation and support services manager, says the key to Juliette’s leadership is her strategic foresight.
“Those who work with her are convinced she’s a little bit psychic… Juliette has the ability to see way off what’s coming and put in place nothing that is so fixed that it can’t be changed. She ensured from the outset that we built in flexibility and, at the same time, through consultation and really listening, pinned down our core principles and values that have remained the same.”
Charlotte
Moreover, adds Charlotte, having a chair who is able to communicate this effectively, backed by a wealth of governance expertise, resulted in Juliette steering Merry Well to identify the community mutual as the most suitable model for the community and attracting staff sympathetic to the social enterprise ethos.
“You need a leader: a front person or leading team who is consistent. They need to believe in what they are doing and be consistent in getting the message across. In my experience, when organisations change that leadership during the setting-up phase, you get a slightly different tone of message and people perceive it as inconsistency. So it is important to have the same person or team throughout the initial stages.”
Juliette
“Because of Juliette, we were able to get it right from the beginning. Having the appropriate governance in place early on has been fundamental to our success. It provides a solid framework, yet it gives us room to manoeuvre.”
Charlotte
Samantha, the managing director, says the capacity within the community mutual model to develop the board, senior management team and staff is exceptional - “even better than I thought it would be”.
Whilst Juliette may initially lead on a new initiative, it is with a view to training or supporting the relevant member of the board or team, then handing over the responsibility.
Samantha describes Juliette’s leadership approach as measured and extremely well informed; the governance she has instigated is so well entrenched, including in the area of succession planning – and the management board compliant with the regulations – that the organisation is not dependent on any one person.
Model choice
The principle factors that prompted Merry Well to eventually become a community mutual were evident in the pioneering days of the Sure Start programme, says Juliette, who was involved at the very beginning in the implementation of the programme’s delivery plan.
Initially set up by an inter-agency partnership, which had no legal status, Sure Start had no constitution to handle money and could not employ staff. Instead, they were employed by a wide variety of local voluntary organisations and, in one case, the district council.
Juliette recalls:
“They were all on different contracts and terms and conditions, and felt very strongly they weren’t a staff group. It meant we couldn’t build a culture; that was the primary concern of the then partnership.”
Furthermore, serious issues emerged about the level of control that local people could exercise over the partnership. This was complicated by divergent political views held by the county and district councils, colouring their perceptions about what should be delivered, and which on certain issues differed substantially from what the local community wanted.
A consensus was finally reached by all parties on the partnership board that the constitutional arrangements needed to change and, explains Juliette:
“After looking at various models, such as charities, we decided that the community mutual was an appropriate model for our particular Sure Start because it covered a geographical area.”
Testing time
The support for and feasibility of establishing a community mutual was subjected to thorough testing at three different levels:
· Partnership - what each agency and representative felt about it, how they perceived their role within such a model, and their understanding and acceptance of new governance responsibilities around the management of money, crucially taking into account the point of view of funders
· Staff - how it would enable them to be directly employed and how they viewed the implications and impact of operating under this model
· Community - whether the community thought this model was one in which it would find a genuine power base, empowering them to be involved in decisions all the way through the organisation
During the year-long period of consultation, the Merry Well rules were drafted. With the help of a solicitor who specialised in co-operative movements and voluntary organisations, the collective stakeholder overview of needs and wants was collated and translated into a legal document.
It was, says Juliette, a vital aid in generally explaining what a social enterprise is (a business that trades for social and environmental purposes, whose profits are reinvested to sustain and further its mission for positive change) and how a community mutual (a society owned by, and run for the benefit of, its current and future members) fitted into that.
“The difference between ourselves and a charity is that we trade. What we have to do is chase new work all the time. We have an expectation that where our four service wings can, they will break even. If they don’t, then the board makes decisions about how they will be supported.”
Juliette
The Merry Well rules document specifically linked the priorities of those consulted to the core purpose: to provide support and care to children, parents and families and the local community, for the benefit of the community and not for the profit of its members. Juliette recalls:
“The rules made it so much easier for us to talk to people because we were no longer talking about ‘what ifs’. We were able to say, ‘This is our purpose and this is what we would have to do if we want to be a community mutual’.”
They have stood the test of time very well, she says, with only two changes, neither of them major, since they were first developed.
Charlotte, who lives in the local area and has worked at the centre for 13 years, explains why:
“Parents’ views have always been at the forefront of everything we do, and the governance that was put in place to uphold this hasn’t changed at all. In my view, it’s the thread that has kept us outstanding.”
Building up credibility in the community
The key to creating the parental and family support base, which was essential for the centre to thrive as a community mutual, involved building a critical mass of parents: mostly women and numbering no more than 12 in the very early stages, they were supported to be ambassadors on the estate.
They faced a suspicious and mistrustful local community, recalls Bridget, one of those parents, and now Merry Well’s community outreach team co-ordinator and youth worker:
“They’d been promised a secondary school on the estate about three times and all sorts of other stuff that hadn’t happened. Their first reaction was, ‘You come round here asking questions about what we’d want from a children’s centre but it’s never going to happen - we’ve been here before’.”
Parent ambassadors covered about a quarter of the estate. They went from door to door, speaking to at least 300 people. After 100 face-to-face interviews, resistance began to diminish, helped hugely by two factors, says Bridget:
“Like them, we were parents living on the estate and knew what it was like. They realised that we understood what they were feeling. Then we started delivering services before the centre was built; that got them in and trust grew.”
A playgroup, crèches and parental support groups operated out of two prefabs, one of which was on a school site. The local authority also provided a flat to be used as an administrative base, thereby enabling the Sure Start programme to have a full-time presence within the community.
Services aimed at getting the under-fives school ready and unemployed parents onto adult education courses were the initial top priorities, according to surveys and meetings conducted with families at the prefabs, although managing expectations, usually over a cup of tea, was very necessary in the early days.
“Some parents wanted us to send them on a family summer holiday. Others wanted us to lay on craft groups, while staff looked after their children, so they were free to do what they wanted.”
Bridget
According to Juliette, delivering the services ‘on account’ helped dispel disbelief and apathy towards what the local community regarded as yet another statutory body.
“Using the critical mass and the service delivery, we built up an approval rating and faith in what we were doing.”