Collaborate
Are you thinking of collaborating?
The changing economic and political context for delivering services to vulnerable people is bringing new impetus to explore what collaboration can achieve. Commissioning and procurement practices continue to lead to fewer, larger contracts. Community based voluntary sector organisations are urged to contribute social value while resources are cut.
The benefits of partnership working for providers of housing, support and care have long been recognised - the potential to improve choice and standards for clients as well as to generate efficiency savings. Under pressure to cut costs, it is vital that organisations look carefully at what collaborative working with which partners could achieve for them and their clients.
Contact Sitra for advice, workshop facilitation or consultancy support to enable your organisation to review options and develop any proposals for collaborative working which will take its services forward.
Sitra has taken over leading on the promotion and dissemination of the Collaborate projects learning from HACT
Collaborate 1: Sustaining diversity through collaborative tendering
Six partnerships that explored collaborative strategies towards tendering for Supporting People contracts.
Much of the housing related support provided in the UK has traditionally come from small, specialist local voluntary organisations. The introduction of competitive tendering processes has made it increasingly difficult for small providers to get new contracts and to continue delivering services.
Collaborate (2007-2009) was developed by HACT in partnership with Sitra and the National Housing Federation to test how different types of consortia would fare under the new Supporting People framework. The project comprised six partnerships – in Durham, Liverpool, Redbridge, Rotherham, Southend and Suffolk – with each exploring a different collaborative approach.
Insights and learning from the project has been developed into a resource kit for small providers and local authorities.
Collaborate 2: Sustaining diversity through clustering
The aim of Collaborate 2 was to look at ways in which small and medium-sized voluntary and community organisations can increase their resilience and get better value from their limited budgets by sharing resources.
The initiative was funded by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and was aimed primarily at organisations delivering Supporting People services. It was not limited to Supporting People providers, since we recognised that the most natural partners for them to collaborate with might be organisations working in related fields which were not receiving Supporting People funding. In the event, however, all of the organisations which took part were Supporting People providers.
Likewise, although the intention was to build the capacity of smaller organisations, we were interested in working with partnerships involving larger organisations and testing the extent to which they can take on a role as “community enabler”. Three of the four pilot projects involved working with larger partners in different ways.
The overall aim of the programme was to draw out the key learning from the pilot programme, and to develop a range of resources which could be used more widely within the voluntary sector.
