Elfrida Rathbone (Camden) 2009-10

ELFRIDA RATHBONE CAMDEN 2009-10

Structure, governance and management

ERC is registered as a charitable company limited by guarantee.The Management Committee, led by the chairperson together with a vice-chair and treasurer, governs the organisation. The Management Committee has, in addition to the elected members, an observer from the London Borough of Camden, whose position is currently as an Early Years education advisor.

The trustees are responsible for the governance of the organisation and delegate the day-to-day management of the organisation to the Director / Company Secretary. ERC’s current chairperson of the Board of Trustees is Sade Alade. The Director works with the team of project managers to ensure that the Charity develops and delivers quality services for our beneficiaries. Alexis Keir has been Director of Elfrida Rathbone Camden(ERC) since June 2007. The remainder of the management team comprises:

Lyn DavisParents & Co Project Manager

Lindsay DentonOffice Manager

Leah DixonLeighton Community Projects Manager

Chris McAuleyFinance Manager

Jenny PoundeLeighton Education Project Manager

Ensuring our work delivers our aims

In December 2008 the Board of Trustees, working with the management team, reviewed and updated the strategic plan for the organisation going forward to 2011 and approved the following mission statement and goals:

Mission Statement

Elfrida Rathbone Camden works to achieve independence, empowerment and personal development for disabled people, children and young people, parents and families.

Our Goals

For the lives of parents and families to be improved by access to the support they feel they need.

For disabled people to be supported to maximise their potential through:

Access to education, training, information and recreation;
Promoting self-esteem, confidence and independence;
Supporting families and carers of disabled people.

For children and young people to have the maximum opportunities to achieve their potential.

Activities and Services

ERC is a multi-faceted voluntary organisation which has been delivering services in the London Borough of Camden since 1982. The organisation has 3 main areas of service provision:

Work with young disabled people – centred around our educational work with young people with learning difficulties aged 19 – 25 we have also, over the last year, developed a volunteering project for young disabled people and a young disabled people’s participation forum. In partnership with the Camden Youth and Connexions Service we also support the 7 O’clock youth club for young disabled people.

Family Support – ERC works in partnership with statutory services to support vulnerable children and their families; we have workers who spend part of their week based with Camden North and South Duty and Assessment Teams and in a Camden Children’s Centre. These workers visit families individually but we also deliver structured parenting programmes and less formal drop-in groups for parents and carers to share experiences and get advice. Support for families where parents are separating or separated is also delivered via a team of family workers based in Camden GP practices.

Advocacy Services – ERC delivers support to help the families of disabled children/children with special educational needs to negotiate with, challenge and understand the systems which arrange educational provision for their children. We also have a Health Advocacy project which offers support to people with learning difficulties in Camden who need to access primary care health services such as the GP, cardio-vascular and breast screening programmes.Funded by the PCT Innovation fund, we have recruited and trained a small group of service users to become peer health advocates.

Public Benefit

Elfrida Rathbone Camden achieves its goals by offering services and support to children, young people, families and disabled people living in Camden and other London boroughs. No-one who fits the criteria to use an ERC service is required to make any payment, and to enable access for people who face barriers of language, social exclusion, ill-health and disability and poverty a range of settings and activities are used.

ERC is a multi-purpose organisation which enables access to services, support, participation, advice and information for a wide range of community members from parents of disabled children to young people with learning disabilities. ERC’s collection of services helps individuals who are among the most disempowered or least proactive in London communities: in 2009/10 we offered support through groupwork and drop-ins alone to over 200 parents (and many other individual service users) of whom nearly 70% were women. One in four of the parents we support are from an ethnic minority community. Our support for parents includes a strong partnership with a group of parents with learning difficulties – 18 of the 20 parents who are regularly supported are women. We also support a group of mothers of children with special educational needs who meet on a weekly basis to offer each other support and advice.

Our Leighton Project again worked with a cohort of 12 young adults with learning difficulties to achieve their educational aims,and over 50 young disabled people participated in our volunteering and media projects, Young People for Inclusion Forum and the 7 O’clock club to participate in activities supporting their wider community involvement.

ERC’s innovative Health Advocacy project helped 23 socially excluded adults with a learning difficulty to access a health service such as going to the GP, and the nine trained peer health advocates delivered a series of workshops in the community and to health professionals to increase awareness of the needs of these service users.

Outcomes and service development

The background to ERC service delivery is that we must constantly check back to those who use our services to ensure that we are meeting their needs effectively and we must also develop new services in response to changing community needs. ERC staff have always valued our links with other local organisations and we try to contribute to initiatives which improve services for all Camden service users. To underpin this we have worked with London Borough of Camden colleagues to look at our monitoring systems, trying to ensure that we record outcomes for service users and not just count outputs. We also played a part in the local pilot of the online Substance monitoring database, contributing feedback to help its development and ensure its relevance to day-to-day service delivery. Similarly Parents & Co workers joined with LB Camden, other children’s services providers and the Triangle Consultancy to help develop the themes for the innovative Family Star to help workers plot the “distance travelled” in specific areas for parents and children.

In 2009-10 ERC expanded its work with young disabled people with the help of two substantial and successful grant applications. One of these was to the Department of Health via bassac to run a volunteering project for young disabled people aged 16-30 funded for £90,000 over 3 years. The second application obtained a 5-year grant of £378, 000 from the Big Lottery Fund to support and develop a participation network in Camden and neighbouring boroughs led by young disabled people themselves enabling them to influence and have a say about the services they use or want to use: the Young People for Inclusion Forum.

ERC has a strong commitment to supporting service users to develop an independent voice and, wherever possible, has sought to provide practical support to enable users to address the tasks needed to form a user-led group.

ERC also hasa strong history and thread of work supporting adults with learning difficulties, in particular parents with learning difficulties, to be fully included in the community.. We have been commissioned for several years by LB Camden to deliver parenting programmes to improve parenting skills and capacity for this group of service users and we also provide direct family support interventions to parents with learning difficulties and their children.

Over several years parents with learning difficulties who work with us have stated their wish to carry out activities based on their own agenda for supporting each other, working together, improving their family life and educating professionals and we have tried to support this. ERC has supported this by helping parents to develop OUR GROUP YOUR GROUP as their own opportunity to meet and work together, supporting them to develop a constitution and their own policies and to seek funding in their own right. ERC also facilitated a link between OGYG and Action Space so that parents and children could take part in an art programme culminating in an exhibition and private view evening.

In terms of family support in August 2010 we entered into a partnership with the Haverstock Healthcare consortium of GP practices in the borough to develop an innovative support service aimed at families where parents are separating or separated. This service expanded our previous model of a family worker based at the Hampstead GP surgery to 5 family workers and an Information worker working from GP practices across the borough, and created within ERC a skilled and enthusiastic new team.

Learning and Training

ERC staff continued to access a range of statutory and voluntary sector training opportunities. For this we are particularly grateful for the opportunities offered by voluntary and statutory sector partners, including LVSC, bassac, Voluntary Action Camden, Volunteer Centre Camden and London Borough of Camden.

Financial review

ERC is in a positive position insofar as we have a diverse portfolio of funding including local authority contracts, Skills Funding and Young People’s Agency funding and grants from the Big Lottery,plus a range of smaller trusts and grant-making bodies. A significant and competitive level of turnover has been maintained by new funding opportunities coming into the organisation including the Separating/Separated Families services, Young People for Inclusion Project and Volunteering for Young Disabled People project.

Our major funding partners continue to be London Borough of Camden (Children, Schools and Families Division including Children’s Centre Services), City Bridge Trust, the Big Lottery Fund, and the Learning and Skills Council (from April 2010 replaced by the Young People’s Learning Agency and Skills Funding Agency).All our major contracts have been renewed, although we are not complacent about increased competition and reduced funding in the public sector. Trustees have noted that locally and centrally funded public sector services face a period of funding stringency and severe cuts at this time and ERC will have to maintain close engagement and dialogue with local service commissioners. Because ERC faces competition for many services whose contracts have been rolled over previously, there needs to be close attention paid to the quality of our services, and to the fit of those services to local requirements.