Small charities make a big contribution to wellbeing in local communities and as recent research has shown, they can be effective at supporting people who are hard to reach, hard to hear and hard to help than bigger charities or public sector organisations and agencies.

The Lloyds Bank Foundation ‘Grow’ project was devised to support small charities with income below £75,000 which were ineligible for support through the Foundation’s existing programmes. This research report explains how these charities responded to support offered to them by specialist consultants.

There have been several initiatives in the past to help small charities to become stronger, bigger and more sustainable, and to encourage them work together to increase their impact. These are all ‘big asks’ and charities often resist attempts by outsiders to change them. But there is little good evidence to make sense of the ‘social processes’ involved in providing such support and explanations for how charities respond.

This report attempts to help fill that gap in our understanding by exploring how the culture and dynamics of small charities affects their readiness to embrace change, to accept support act upon advice in several areas of development which may be important for their future wellbeing.

Small charities may lack structural complexity (unlike larger more formal organisations with a specialised division of labour and hierarchical command chains which are underpinned by bureaucratic principles and procedures) but this does not mean that their internal dynamics are simple.

The analysis hinges upon a recognition that very small charities are much more complicated social entities than immediately meets the eye.

The full report can be downloaded here:

 The Social Process of Supporting Small Charities (March 2019)

A blog on the findings can be found here:

https://tonychapmanblog.wordpress.com/2019/06/18/valuing-small-charities-for-what-they-are-not-what-they-should-be/

Many young people in County Durham are not achieving as much as they should as they make their journey towards adulthood. While much support is lent to young people to achieve their potential, it falls unevenly – too often being focused upon those who already have many advantages.

Recognising that this was unacceptable, Durham County Council commissioned this research via the Institute for Local Governance in 2016 to start a debate in the County on how to achieve more for young people from less advantaged backgrounds.  There is widespread belief in the UK that young people from less-advantaged backgrounds are less likely to make successful transitions to adult life because they lack aspiration and ambition.

Over-simplified explanations such as these are readily backed up with examples, garnered from observation and experience, which serve to reinforce falsehoods. With sufficient repetition these falsehoods start to ring true. To instigate discussion across all sectors, this study was undertaken to  hold up a mirror to County Durham, and ask policy makers and practitioners  to look again at the situation of young people and challenge popular narratives about young people’s presumed lack of aspiration and ambition.

Policy makers and practitioners are encouraged to consider critically the differences between ‘aspiration’ and ‘ambition’; ‘attitudes’ and ‘behaviours’; ‘attainment’ and ‘achievement’, and most crucially, ask questions about what constitutes ‘success in life’ for young people from different starting points. By doing so, it is hoped that organisations in the education, public, private and voluntary sectors will be able to focus their resources individually or in complementary ways on those young people who are most in need of support.

Professor Tony Chapman, Dr Tanya Gray, Dr Stephanie Rich and Paul Braidford were commissioned by the Institute for Local Governance to undertake a project on young people’s ambitions and aspirations in County Durham.

The report was launched on 29th March 2019 at an event at Bishop Auckland Town Hall which was opened by the Bishop of Durham, the Right Reverend Paul Butler.

A summary report on the project can be downloaded here: Tackling barriers to young people’s aspirations and ambitions in County Durham SUMMARY REPORT March 2019

The full report can be downloaded here: Understanding barriers to young people’s aspirations and ambition in County Durham (full report March 2019)

The event presentation can be downloaded here: Understanding barriers to young people presentation March 29th 2019

Policy&Practice at St Chad’s College was commissioned to evaluate the National Youth Agency’s ‘The Environment Now’  programme of work funded by the Big Lottery’s ‘Our Bright Future’ initiative in 2016.  The project was also supported by O2 Telefonica.

Our Bright Future allowed the NYA to to work intensively with young people over three years developing environmental projects. Funding was awarded to undertake 50 projects devised and run by young people who were, in turn, supported and trained through a comprehensive programme to develop their sustainability learning, employability skills, digital understanding and self-confidence.

An  investment of up to £10,000 was made in each of the 50 projects to help meet key environmental challenges.  Project leaders were supported by NYA programme staff and specialist O2 Telefonica mentors. The project aimed to help produce sustainability leaders of the future.

The evaluation of the programme was undertaken independently by Professor Tony Chapman and Stephanie Rich of Policy&Practice who were involved from the initial planning stage to design a comprehensive and rigorous methodology to blend qualitative and quantitative data.

The final report was published in January 2019. NYA The Environement Now Programme Evaluation (January 2019)

Professor Tony Chapman and Dr Tanya Gray are starting a new project for the  Power to Change Research Institute on trading interactions amongst community businesses in Bradford, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.

The term ‘community business’ (CB) includes a range of organisations including: Companies Limited by Guarantee, Cooperatives and Community Benefit Societies, Community Interest Organisations, Community Interest Companies and Registered Charities. Some CBs have been operating for decades while others are relatively new, emerging from, for example, asset transfer programmes. While some community businesses are large, employing many staff, the majority are quite small.

Most CBs rely primarily upon trading to sustain their activity. Trading includes sales of space, self-generated services that meet the identified needs of the local community or manufactured goods, and through the delivery of services for other organisations. Because they also tend to rely on grants and in-kind support from other organisations, we need to know how that affects their approach to earning income from trading.

The principal aim of the research is to explore the extent to which community businesses build beneficial relationships with other community businesses – thereby strengthening each other’s financial situation and deepening their contribution to local economy and society.

Examples of such interactions may include opportunity signposting and appraisal, customer referral, inter-trading, sharing facilities or kit, partnership bidding for grants or contracts, skills-exchanges, media and public relations initiatives, informally sharing the burden of roles in representation on boards and committees, and so on. These interactions may produce indirect or direct financial benefit.

In the research we intend to explore the range and depth of relationships CBs establish and find out how they were initiated and became embedded over time. We also want to find out if these trading relationships are more effective in meeting ‘local needs’ and being ‘locally accountable’ than other charities or private businesses. Finally, it will be useful to find out what kinds of support CBs may need to build stronger relationships with other CBs in their locality and explore how and by whom such support be best delivered.

Knowing how and why some CBs successfully build and sustain positive working relationships with other CBs will help gauge the scope for and benefits to be gained from intensifying positive, trusting and mutually beneficial trading relationships. In disadvantaged areas, where there may be fewer private sector businesses, such interactions could produce significant economic and social benefit by retaining resources within the community.

Indirectly, CBs may benefit significantly if funders and development organisations such as Power to Change become aware of the benefits of promoting or engendering certain types of CB-to-CB interactions and thereby deepen the quality, volume and depth of positive interactions.

Communicating the benefits of CB-to-CB interactions may help to encourage more of this kind of activity – but only when we can be sure that the circumstances leading to the establishment of such relationships are identifiable, understood and replicable.

The research begins in March 2018 and will conclude in April 2019 with a series of reports and events to communicate the key messages.

A remarkable regeneration project is now well underway to create a world-class visitor destination in Bishop Auckland, County Durham. At its heart is a mission to revitalise the future of the town through employment, training and educational opportunities.

As an attraction, The Auckland Project will comprise Auckland Castle, for centuries the private palace of the Prince Bishops of Durham, along with galleries, gardens, restaurants, a park, a hotel and England’s first museum exploring the history of faith in the British Isles.

Thanks to National Lottery players, The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has made a substantial grant of £11.4m to The Project to support the conservation of the Castle and the creation of the new Faith Museum, as well as associated community activities.

Professor Fred Robinson and Ian Zass-Ogilvie from St Chad’s College have now been commissioned by The Auckland Project to undertake an evaluation of this important HLF-supported work.

Fred Robinson said: “We are delighted to have the opportunity to support The Auckland Project. It’s a really interesting approach to regeneration and we all hope it will make a big difference to the local economy and help revitalise the community.”

“Our role is to evaluate what’s being achieved by the Project – and look at the wider impacts too. We look forward to working closely with The Auckland Project.”

Small charities form the bedrock of civil society.   So their wellbeing needs to be attended to, especially in places where there are concentrations of economic difficulties.  The problem with previous attempts to strengthen small charities is that ‘gold standards’ about what a successful organisation should look like have been adopted.  And far too often, standardised tools have been developed to build the ‘capacity’ and ‘capability’ of such charities which simply don’t address the specific needs of individual charities.

Lloyds Bank Foundation has invested significant resources in the development of charities for many years through its Engage and Enhance programmes.  But some charities which really need help don’t meet the eligibility criteria. This project seeks to change that by working with a small number of charities, intensively, over a period of a year.

Known as Lloyds Bank Foundation’s ‘Grow’ programme, this project seeks to experiment with new approaches to strengthen small charities without demanding standardised outcomes which meet the expectations of outsiders rather than of charities themselves.

Based in two areas of the UK which have been challenged economically in recent years, the project will invest significant levels of support to help charities become more resilient as organisations and effective in what they do but without necessarily expecting them to grow or change beyond the ambitions they set themselves.

Professor Tony Chapman has been chosen to assist in the development of this two year programme and will evaluate the success of the intervention.

The project will conclude in June 2018 and our evaluation report will be published in March  2019.  A link to the publication will be provided when available.

Professor Tony Chapman and Stephanie Rich are to evaluate the National Youth Agency’s My Money Now programme which is funded by the Money Advice Service. The project brings together tried and tested approaches to inform the development of financial literacy and sustained money management skills and builds on the success of an existing intervention (Barclays Money Skills Champions).

Its purpose is to strengthen the existing evidence on the immediate advantages of the previous programme for Money Skills Champions, to get a better understanding of how peer education improves the financial capability of 16-21 year olds who are engaged in apprenticeships and which, in turn, has the potential to help influence subsequent decision making which could have longer-term benefit by enhancing the likelihood of improved retention on apprenticeship schemes.

More specifically, the evaluation aims to explore the efficacy of the project through the following research questions:

• To determine if the NYA’s existing approach to ‘peer education’ has distinctive and beneficial impacts upon young people’s approach to learning about discrete financial issues which are replicable for young people from disadvantaged or marginalised backgrounds.
• To find out if the financial learning intervention has a positive impact by improving young people’s knowledge about financial issues and strengthens their locus of control when making immediate financial decisions.
• To explore whether increasing knowledge and skills through peer education about financial issues may impact positively on young people’s ability to navigate key life transitions by weighing up the ‘opportunity costs’ of their decisions in financial and personal development terms.

The project runs for 15 months, beginning in January 2017.

This project has now been completed and it is expected that the final report will be published on the MAS evidence hub website in May 2018 – a link will be provided here when available.

Professor Fred Robinson is working with Professor Keith Shaw of Northumbria University on a new study looking at structures and processes of governance in North East England. They will be finding out who runs public services in the region and assessing how accountable they are. They will be looking at different models of governance — some elected, others appointed. And they will be asking what works best and how we can make governance better.

It’s certainly a timely project. There is considerable disenchantment with the people who run things. Many people distrust elites, politicians and the ‘establishment’. There are widespread feelings of powerlessness and alienation – as the EU Referendum demonstrated. But there is no simple answer to the problems facing us. Electing people to run things like Councils or the Police seems attractive, but turnouts are so low that there’s really only limited democratic legitimacy. Appointing people to run services – the boards of NHS Trusts, or the Governing Bodies of universities, for example – may bring in expertise, but can be seen to be about recruiting the ‘usual suspects’. And referendums — making decisions by asking the people — don’t seem to work all that well either.

Fred and Keith want the research to inform, but also to be the basis for challenge and reform. They’ve looked at these issues before, back in 2000, when much of the concern was about unelected quangos. They helped influence the debate then – institutions in the region started thinking more about the gender balance (or lack of it) on their boards and the need to have representation from BME communities. Since 2000, some things have changed for the better – but there’s certainly room for a lot more improvement. Many institutions are still dominated by the ‘male, pale and stale’.

The project has secured funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Institute for Local Governance and Newcastle-based Law firm Muckle LLP. It started in September 2016 and will run for a year. It’s a practical project, which aims to encourage better practice and make governance more accountable, transparent and representative.

The final report can be found Who Runs the North East Now — Main Report Oct 2017 FINAL (2).

In September 2016, the Third Sector Trends study will be formally launched across the North of England. We need to hear from all types of voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises, whether large or small, thriving, struggling or going on as normal. The study will take place in each northern region in three separate surveys:

In North East England (funded by the Community Foundation for Tyne & Wear and Northumberland). Link to the survey questionnaire:  https://durham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/third-sector-trends-in-north-east-england-2016

In Yorkshire and the Humber (funded by Joseph Rowntree Foundation); Link to the survey questionnaire: https://durham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/third-sector-trends-in-yorkshire-and-the-humber-2016

In North West England* (funded by IPPR\North and Garfield Weston); Link to the survey questionnaire: https://durham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/third-sector-trends-in-north-west-england-2016

*In Greater Manchester, the study started in July 2016 to complement a separate study by a consortium of local third sector development agencies.

We will be able to tell you what is happening, in big picture terms, in the sector in your area, region and across Northern England?

These are just a few of the issues the Third Sector Trends study can explore

• We can make well evidenced estimates on the changing shape, size and structure of the sector as a whole (comparing with previous TST data and from a major national government study in 2010 on each local authority area).
• We can also produce data reports for any local authority area, sub region or county so you can see what is happening in the area your Community Foundation serves.
• We can explore the different experiences, practices and expectations of organisations by size, purpose, geographical location, legal form, and so on – this will help funders identify the kinds of organisations which may be able to benefit most from grants.
• We can make good estimates of the level of employment and volunteering in the sector and determine where employment or volunteering is growing or contracting.
• We can show which areas of beneficiary need are doing well or experiencing difficulties.
• We can calculate the economic value of the sector using robust estimates and also monetise the value of volunteering.

We need third sector, public sector and private sector organisations to encourage voluntary organisations, community groups and social enterprises to respond to this major study. It is vital that as many organisations and groups as possible find out about the study so that they have a chance to respond – so we need you to tell them about it in newsletters and to send links to the survey through by email to your address lists.

Each study will result in a separate regional report together with one report, published by IPPR\North for the whole Northern Region.

If you would like to know more about the study, please contact Professor Tony Chapman, St Chad’s College, Durham University: tony.chapman@durham.ac.uk

Dzulfian Syafrian is an economist whose research covers public policy, financial institutions and economic development. Since January 2016, Dzulfian has been undertaking his PhD at St. Chad’s College and Durham University Business School.

Dzulfian’s PhD project is focusing on the impact of Japanese inward investment in manufacturing Industry on the economy and society of North East England. This research concentrates on the relationship between Japanese companies and indigenous British companies.

The project aims to:

• understand how the Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) and the process of “Japanisation” of Western companies works in Britain;
• define what the effects of Japanese FDI are on the economy and society of the North East; and,
• determine what challenges companies face and how they overcome these.

This project is the under supervision of Professor Tony Chapman (St. Chad’s College – Durham University) and Professor John Mawson (Director of the Institute for Local Governance, Durham University Business School).