#member-led

Assignment Scope:

Together Works CIC was the Greater Manchester support network for Social Enterprises in a regional partnership with Social Enterprise North West.  It had not been offering direct services to members for 18 months.  I was contracted by the Board of Directors to engage with social enterprise members in Greater Manchester and senior stakeholders to re-position the organisation to offer beneficial services that would attract strategic support and ultimately funding.

How assignment was implemented:

Conducted survey of Members and non-members to identify common themes in challenges and opportunities facing the sector.

Developed and implemented a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy identifying and building relationships with key stakeholders across Greater Manchester and ensuring deep understanding of high-level strategies (e.g. tackling worklessness, Social Value Act and GM Strategy) and their influence to the possible strategic objectives of Together Works CIC.

Further consultation through facilitated Focus Groups and Networking Events for GM based Social Enterprises.

Undertook an organisational diagnostic based on the McKinsey 7S model and produced final report with recommend actions to Board of Directors.

Analysed data from Members Survey and Organisational Diagnostic and presented results in easily digested format with costed and prioritised options to Board of Directors.

Secured financial investment to design and implement two new time-limited services:

Supporting Community Initiatives Programme

Social Investment Readiness Programme

Created a project team consisting of a “Programme & Partnerships Coordinator” and “Communications Officer” and developed a detailed five month project work-plan for the team to follow and complete.

Ran two programmes to time and budget ensuring intended outputs and outcomes were achieved and successes and challenges reported back to Funders.

Assignment’s impact:

Despite significant governance challenges that resulted in the recent closure of Together Works CIC, myself and the project team were able to significantly increase membership by 35% in less than six months by designing, resourcing and implementing strategically influenced and member-informed programmes offering support and skills development. 

The Supporting Community Initiatives Programme (SCIP) took 15 newly emerging social entrepreneurs through the basics of business planning ensuring that they were supported to develop a robust and realistic plan to help them start-up their initiative.  All participants stated the course had significantly increased their knowledge and confidence.  All participants are still successfully progressing their enterprise and are contributing to their local and regional social economy.

The Social Investment Readiness Programme (SIRP) took ten Greater Manchester Social Enterprises through a training programme to test and hone the investment readiness of their income generating ideas before pitching them to a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style panel of six national and regional social investors.  The information and evidence from this programme was packaged into an online toolkit to be available to other social enterprises wanting to secure investment financing including a Traffic Light Toolkit and links to practical guidance on addressing any investment readiness issues. 

Trustees – your M&As plainly state what business the charity can do but a Trustee Board Charter enables you to agree between yourselves and your stakeholders how you plan and carry out your business.

Today I have been developing a series of tools, templates and workshop content to enable the creation of a Trustee Board Charter for the charity of which I’m the Chair.

This has included:

Designing a pre-workshop questionnaire (to capture insights from the introverts).

Designing the structure and content for a 3.5 workshop that I’ll be facilitating.

Proposing a process to manage the expectations between Board and Staff and ensure buy-in to the final content of the charter through debate, negotiations and agreements.

Creating a template Charter document for completion after the workshop.

Creating a template document for Terms of Reference for sub-committees that link back up to the TB Charter.

All of the above has had to consider the following:

Accessibility and consideration of clients’ needs

Moving towards a democratic member-led charity model of Governance

Efficiency

Effectiveness

Enjoyment

Buy-in

I’ve already received some great feedback on the pre-workshop questionnaires from my fellow Trustees and have incorporated this into the workshop sessions.  I’m confident that we’ll have all our key Governance documents reviewed and approved over the next few months so we can start recruiting new Trustees in June (as planned).  I am really looking forward to Thursday when we can all get together and start to put some flesh on the bones.