CONSULTANCY: CLIENT

A small voluntary organisation in North London wanted to submit a re-application for Lottery funding but didn’t have the internal capacity to undertake this work itself.

BRIEF

The brief was for us to produce a revised funding application to the Lottery incorporating community views and resolving concerns regarding management capacity previously expressed by the Lottery.

Specifically:-

• Identifying and consulting with local community groups about the proposals.
• Reviewing systems, procedures and policies in place to manage the funds effectively.
• Liaising with Lottery staff to ensure that criteria for funding application were fully addressed by the re-submission.
• Drafting the re-submission and presenting to the Management Committee for approval.

OUTCOME

Officers’ and Trustees’ job descriptions in place.

Strengthened Management Committee by recommending the immediate appointment of a Treasurer.

Highlighted need for organisation to adopt a comprehensive scheme of financial delegation.

Application successful and organisation received from the Big Lottery Fund funding of £139K over 3 years for a worker to work with asylum seeking and refugee parents and parents with an African or Caribbean Heritage.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

“The ten days you spent working with GETT to improve our application to the Big Lottery Fund so that it would be more likely to succeed was more than useful. Without it we certainly would not have been successful in the application.

The time-consuming work in setting up meetings with relevant community groups, explaining the nature of the project, eliciting their honest opinions of the project and then putting these views in writing so we could send them, as supporting documentation, with the application was essential. We could not have done this without your help.

Your advice and work on improving our procedures so that potential funders would be confident in GETT being capable of successfully managing a large amount of money and employing a worker was vital. In addition it was very helpful for you to advice us on how we should modify our budgetary information in the application form.

We will be more than happy to recommend Stenning Consultancy to other Organisations.” Scott Reeve, Chair

TRAINING: CLIENT

Mosaic Homes was a medium sized Registered Social Landlord with the bulk of its properties in Hackney, Islington and Essex. (The Association has since merged with Family Housing Association to become Family Mosaic.)

BRIEF

The association embarked on a programme whereby all staff participated in a programme of Development Centres. The centres comprised of a half day where delegates participated in a range of activities which were designed to objectively measure an individuals’ performance against the core competencies.
A grading was developed which gave a scale comprising significant development need, development need, broadly competent, area of strength and significant strength.
At the end of the exercise the data was organised and all staff that had scores within their reports at below broadly competent level were given developmental training to get them to the required level of competence. This is where we came in. We had designed and delivered some recruitment and selection training for the Association in the past and we were their first choice to deliver this workshop.

OUTCOME

Following discussions with the HR Manager, a series of one-day training was designed to address the gaps in diversity and business awareness identified by the Development Centre assessments.

• A draft programme was produced for client comments and/or approval.
• Comprehensive delegate notes produced to accompany workshop.
• Training workshop delivered as planed to 38 staff of the Association.

CLIENT FEEDBACK

“Letitia came in took the brief and drew up a programme to address the training needs of the delegate and that of the organisation. There was the option of feeding in to the process so what we got was a well designed specifically developed training course rather than a one size fits all approach.
The feedback from those attending was uniformly of a very high standard with people reporting that the training had given them real awareness of their own needs and what the competencies meant for them. This was exactly what we wanted. The whole development centre programme had been initially resisted but the training really did increase awareness of what we were doing and what the competencies meant in real terms.” Simon Gates, HR Manager, Family Mosaic