Total Transformation Project

Project 5: Developing Community Capacity

Probable participants

Hampshire, Southampton, Croydon, Tower Hamlets, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Oldham, Cumbria, Newcastle

Outcome

A set of tools to enable Local Authorities to work with communities to promote community cohesion, inclusivity and active citizenship. The aim will be to assist communities to provide the sort of environment where people can flourish, and where most do not require social care support; and where it is required, to ensure that community members embrace Self-Directed Support and actively encourage all citizens to be in control.

In particular this project will involve

  1. Testing out and refining different approaches to community building across each authority
  2. Developing and refining a model to look at how LA intervention can facilitate community development (See IC paper 'Community Capacity Building and Social Care')
  3. Exploring links between the Place Shaping and Personalisation agendas

Components

  • Increased investment in community initiatives - brought about by demonstrating 'proof of concept' that community investment works
  • Testing out a 'real wealth' model of individual and family capacity.
  • Better links between social care departments and other parts of the authority
  • Establishing best practice around a range of community capacity building interventions.
  • Establishing better links between social care departments and other parts of the authority

Strands of work

  • Mapping of existing community capacity building initiatives, other local initiatives going on, and links to other stakeholders.
  • Developing existing initiatives or creating new ones (suggested 2 per authority) - implementing and defining best practice/ workshops involving other stakeholders
  • Evaluation stage 1 - over the first phase of the project the aim is to evaluate effectiveness of interventions using current IC needs/costs/outcome framework
  • Evaluation stage 2 - to measure efficiency - i.e. impact on other parts of the social care system. Where authorities have a RAS in place and are near to reaching scale in terms of number of people using SDS, our proposal is to capture the impact of community interventions on the number of people coming through RAS and their need levels.
  • Wider dissemination of findings, publicity

Outputs

To be defined by larger project group - further thought is needed to determine specific outputs from each project strand.

Work to Include

  • Determining evaluation mechanism
  • Impact of prevention activity on core social care/mapping impact on other areas of the community
  • Define best practice for engaging other stakeholders in design and development of community activity
  • Developing and refining 'real wealth' model - thinking of practical ways to test this and operationalise through RAS etc.
  • Defining and collecting best practice for each of the different interventions proposed

The Network: Roles

In Control Leads

  • set up meetings on a bi-monthly basis (propose to ask participating sites to rotate hosting to reduce costs)
  • visit individual sites at least twice during the project
  • act as a central point of communication to support consistency and ensure that at least one person has track of all that is going on
  • invite experts/stakeholders where and when the groups want them to attend
  • maintain the project specific section on the IC website as a central bank of resources and forum for this project
  • Disseminate notes, agendas, resources before each meeting

Participating sites

  • Two project leads appointed - at least one representative to attend each bi-monthly meeting
  • each site will convene where necessary a group of people to work on this within their own area, and including partners from outside of the social care department and from outside the authority where appropriate.
  • Will work with others to embed evaluation mechanism and generally to look at how the intervention relates and the impact it has on other areas of the authority
  • Undertake some drafting and writing work as and when the group is in a position to produce materials
  • Will commit to writing up best practice and outcome from monitoring and evaluation of local projects

Work

  1. Agree priorities, identify a list of materials that the project group will provide at the end of 18 months and at key milestones
  2. Work towards developing and implementing projects ASAP - to be able to contribute to paper on development issues after 6 months, paper on best practise 12 months.
  3. Support development of an evaluation mechanism.

Timescale

The project will be for 18 months, from Nov 2008 - there are 3 milestones 6 months, 12 months, and 18 months. At each point a brief report and copies of any draft materials will be made available to the whole of the TT community.

The next Six months

Questionnaires sent out end October. First meeting planned for 8th Jan.

Suggestion is that each authority works to define and develop 2 projects - determining priorities that they want to achieve. By end of May 09 to have paper outlining issues related to development, and building coalitions with other parts of the authority.

Projects should have some evaluation component built in. Further work to develop an overarching evaluation strategy.

Suggest that workshops on community are held in authorities that want them (with IC support) - bringing in other partners.

Project leads

07791 282 812

Example interventions

The following was taken from a proposal to do similar work in the Yorks and Humber region. They give examples of the kind of practical interventions that the project will be developing. It is the aim of the project to build on existing initiatives where possible or for projects to develop out of these.

Community Facilitation in York

York Local Authority hasjust recruited three (1ft, 2pt) Community Facilitatorsto support people to make connections and tolook at more effective ways of engagingpeople who are leaving day centres. Part of the role will be to develop the capacity of communities to be better able to meet the needs of people. The new rolehas many themesin common withthe Local Area Co-ordination model developed in Western Australia and used widely in Scotland. It combines individual support and community capacity building components.

Kirklees Gateway workers

These are locality based workers who help people who are not eligible for a full service from the adult social care department to access other things available to them. The scheme supports all groups of people with a variety of needs. They can signpost people to information and other local services as well as helping people to link up with neighbourhood and community organisations and to discover other local activities, leisure pursuits and learning opportunities.

POPPS project in Calderdale

The recently reviewed POPPS programme has seen 29 pilot authorities developa range of projects providing preventative support for older people. They extend from those that are targeted across the whole older population such as handiman and befriending services to specific interventions that focus on individuals most at risk. There is strong evidence that the programmeproducespreventative savings - 73p for each £1 spent from savingson the cost of hospital emergency day beds alone (DoH Oct 2008;POPP interim report of progress). However the report suggests there is less evidence about what the most effective interventions look like.

Re-ablement

Supports tomaximise independence and help peopleregain quality of life i.eby helping people tore-learn the skills necessary for daily living (homecare re-ablement). CSED Pilots of re-ablement schemes have had impressive results (i.e. De Montford university study for CSED found 62% people using re-ablement services ceased to require a homecare package at 1st review stage, 6 weeks post intervention.) East Ridings, North Yorks, Rotherham, and Wakefield are piloting reablement initiatives.

Funding for grass-roots community groups in Doncaster

The Adult Social Care department in Doncaster distributes a fund of £50,000 annually to support the development of community, voluntary and self-help groups with a health and well-being focus in local communities. The fund has a good track record of helping groups to develop, for example one small church group that was helped has now become a social enterprise providing meals and a befriending service to vulnerable people. Doncaster are currently reviewing utilization of this fund and planning use it to support community groups to engage with the prevention agenda. The social care department say that this is more important now than ever, that the authority are delivering services on a neighbourhood model. Development work funded through the JIP could be a key to evaluating this approach.

Low-level grant giving i.e. Small Sparks

Low-level grantschemes haveproved effective at galvanising people's skills and initiativeto projects that enable them to contribute to the local community. This goes a long way to helpingpeople stay engaged and connected and so more likely to remainindependent for longer. Small Sparks is an example. A project in the East Riding of Yorkshire was so successful thatone participant Neil Atkinson was asked tohelp allocate grant moniesin future. Small Sparks has been described as 'a bridge over no-man's land between services and community life'.