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Foresight in action: views from CEFET

1/15/2010

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Foresight in action

How did CEFET use strategic analysis to respond to their changing environment successfully?

Read on for this exclusive access to the insights of Laurie Moran, chief executive at CEFET.

Can you give me an example of how CEFET has reacted to an external change or trend?The last European programme was the 2000-2007 and some of the parameters for that were set in discussions 2 or 3 years before. There were two elements that CEFET were aware of during those few years before, one was that in the new programme there would be a reserve for what is known as global grants.

Secondly, there was a pilot programme for local social capital, which gave small grants to small organisations who couldn’t get match funding or jump through the hoops of European funding. The grants were specifically to build local social capital. There were three pilots in the UK: Plymouth, Manchester and Scotland.

At that time CEFET primarily gave funding advice but we saw these changes coming. We knew that the third sector was much better at supporting people who were a long way from the labour market and the more accessible the grants became the better the chances that the third sector could be successful with the funding.

In what ways did undertaking strategic analysis help you to identify future opportunities and challenges?
We made a strategic decision to try to get the global grants programme, worth about £2 million ESF, worth £4 million by the time you have matched it up over a 6/7 year period. We knew this was coming and we wanted to make that work for local social capital. So we had conferences, we got the Manchester pilot to come down here and talk about their experiences, lobbied with other strategic partners, most notably emda, and we influenced the Regional Committee, which we are a representative of, and we got the Regional Committee to set up a working group to talk about global grants, with us and local authorities, colleges and probably the TEC at that time.

We basically won the region over to the idea that global grants should be concentrated on the local social capital model as exemplified in Manchester.

We got emda to fund, put up half the money that was needed for the first year pilot and it was very successful. They also commissioned an external evaluation which gave it glowing reports and therefore, CEFET ran the programme after the pilot, we managed to get money from whoever wanted the programme, mainly from local authorities and people like that.

We said that if you want this programme in your area, put up half the money, you will get more than that back in grants. That worked from late 2001, it took a year of lobbying, it took a year to have an affect. It finished about 18 months ago.

What we thought was innovative from the Manchester pilot was that it was a group of the peers of excluded people themselves who should decide who should receive the grants.

We checked that the projects were eligible and that the expenses were right but it was a panel, for example here in Nottingham NDC area the funding was for young people so there was a young people’s panel. They had to form the majority of the panel. In most cases in most areas the panel was formed 100% from the target community.

In what ways have the changes you have implemented had an impact on your organisations, your beneficiaries and external stakeholders?
About 7000 people went through the programme and we sampled them and we found the average time out of the labour market was 33 months. It got people into training programmes and community activity; it outperformed many ordinary training programmes.

The thing about the programme is that you run the programme, you come up with the idea, you run it, it might be community youth, gardening, setting up a rock band, football, anything. The criteria were that you had to do it and it had to somehow build collective working, community spirit. And the doing of the project was much more important than what the product was.

We polled everybody on this project and asked “would you have joined exactly the same project if it had been run by someone else?” 64% said “no”. This is part of a community empowerment programme. We got the idea of community empowerment written into ESF strategic document. The idea is that you are doing things and identifying answers to your own problems. As you probably know there is controversy about what is happening in the new Programme.

So that is a very good example and it touched many, as well as the people who directly participated which was over 7000 people, we asked how many members of the community have somehow been touched by or benefited, and that came to nearly 200,000. It went into 29 different communities, sometimes they were quite wide communities, for example the whole of Leicestershire, some were small geographic and concentrated. It’s been a big success. We were able to do this because a) we knew that this opportunity was coming up and b) we knew how to make connections with people who were already starting to think about that.

Are there any trends that you think may create particular challenges for organisations in the East Midlands in the future?
I think the biggest issue, not specifically for this region, but the biggest challenge affecting the sector is the tendency for commissioning and procurement to go to big contracts.

I think that this agenda is being prosecuted with increasing speed over the last four or five years anyway and if the Tories win, that pace will quicken.

Main contractors don’t have the detailed knowledge to commission/contract properly and they don’t want to write 400 contracts for £100,000, they want to write one contract for £4 million. Their answer, when you say well actually the third sector don’t want to provide £4 million is that some of you should club together to apply all together. This is self defeating because first of all it means that all the work putting those bids together, instead of being the work of an overseeing strategic body, it is now put up at the behest of lots of individual bids.

And secondly it has the impetus of making what very small specific provision no longer small and specific, feeling in contact with your client group or community. Being forced to be a bigger organisation, you lose your unique selling point. It’s making the VCS look more like the statutory sector, more bureaucratic.

It actually works to destroy the diversity in the market, market differentiation. There is an argument whether that is an unavoidable problem with markets or whether it’s just the way markets tend to behave when they are not properly controlled.

About CEFET

CEFET is a regional infrastructure organisation based in the East Midlands. CEFET particularly works to combat social exclusion, to promote equal opportunities and social capital and to enable grassroots capacity building.

In the last ESF programme (2000 - 2007), CEFET was a lead partner in developing the East Midlands Community Empowerment Strategy after consulting extensively with the sector about inclusion issues. This strategy has had international acclaim and was cited favourably in the last UK government's National Action Plan for Social Inclusion (NAP).

Currently they are supporting the Social Inclusion Policy Forum. If you would like more information, please contact them on info@cefet.org.ukor 0115 911 0419.

Trends training: If you would like training, from NCVO Third Sector Foresight and One East Midlands, in strategic analysis then read more.

This interview was brought to you under the partnership NCVO Third Sector Foresight have with One East Midlands, funded by Capacitybuilders’ National Support Services Programme.