Forth Sector LOCAL EMPLOYABILITY PROVIDER Field of Activity Mental health and employability
Geographical Coverage Edinburgh
2008/09 2009/10 2010/11
Number of Staff
Annual Income £1,431,703.00 £1,689,997.00 £1,370,511.00 Proportion of Income
from Public Funding
Not available Not available 33%
Background
Forth Sector provides ‘employability support to aid the recovery of people with mental health problems’. Forth Sector seeks to achieve this aim by offering placements within businesses owned by the organisation and providing pre-employment and in-work support to enable individuals to sustain pre-employment.
Year One
Following a process of reassessment, the organisation developed a Five Year Business Plan:
"One of the key elements from that [the business plan] was about growing ourselves as an organisation – becoming much bigger and much stronger and much more robust and about having social enterprises which would generate income and pay for themselves and not be reliant on subsidy through Service Level Agreements or ESF or whatever else to pay for some of the core staffing costs".
(Senior Manager A, year one)
As part of this, they carried out a review of the existing social firms. At that time, these included a laundry, a soap making business and a guest house which offered supported work placements for clients. In recent years, the businesses had been in a state of flux, with a lack of investment and the economic downturn affecting the viability of some of these.
In the last year, the organisation made the decision to set up Forth Sector
Development as a separate company from Forth Sector, the charity. Forth Sector Development provides support for other social enterprises, but still had an important role in the charity, particularly since the social businesses had been struggling.
Year Two
By year two, Forth Sector Development had been doing well, picking up a number of major contracts to support other third sector organisations to develop social
enterprise activity.
"[Forth Sector Development] covenants surpluses to Forth Sector, the charity. It is a social enterprise...it is there to generate income and really support the rest of the organisation given that...the businesses at the moment aren’t creating a surplus and in fact have been operating at a loss...it has in the past quite heavily subsidised the other parts of the organisation. It’s an important source of income...we are trading on our intellectual capital".
(Senior Manager B, year two) A decision was also made to rationalise the social firms. In order to access some of the organisation’s capital assets, they were planning to sell the Guesthouse. They also invested in another laundry business in order to complement their existing business.
At the same time, they had been awarded £1M from the Scottish Investment Fund in order to develop a purpose-built employability hub at a site at Duddingston Yard in Edinburgh’s Craigmillar area. With additional funding which they hoped to win from the National Lottery, they hoped to have completed the build and move by summer 2012.
At the same time, they were also looking at what to do with the other social firms that were not proving profitable:
"It’s about deciding where you are going to put your energy...and resource...if you’re spread too thinly you could be starving those
businesses that have the best chance of success of the resource that they need and actually propping something up that is frankly limping along. I think you’ve just got to make those decisions".
(Senior Manager B, year two) One senior manager attributed a lack of capital investment in the social firms at an earlier stage as an issue that limited their potential for success. Learning lessons
from past experience, the organisation hoped that through significant investment now, they would be able to forward towards a successful and sustainable future.
Year Three
Forth Sector Development continued to do well and had worked with Government, local authorities, private and third sector organisations to provide professional support and consultancy services to develop social enterprise activity.
The Guesthouse had been sold and the profits from the sale had allowed for "a little investment in some of the departments". Meanwhile, the new laundry acquired in year two had been merged with the existing laundry making further cost savings. In addition, they had been successful in pulling down some development funding (from Esme Fairburn) which was:
"Allowing them to review some of the businesses…that’s helping some of the development of the businesses, so the businesses are developing and growing…the money’s allowed some sales and marketing managers to come on board, one’s on board and there’s another post coming on board.
Their role is to increase the sales for the businesses and that will then generate more income into the organisation".
(Senior Manager, year three) The Duddingston Yard development project had been put on hold awaiting
confirmation of Lottery Funding. There had been some complications with the application resulting in a delay, but it was anticipated that this would be successful and the project would go ahead in the future. It was hoped that this major
investment programme would see the number of clients supported increase fourfold, the cost of supporting clients would fall further, the quality of services would improve and trading revenue would double, as well as an increase in the economic and social impact.
ROSEMOUNT LIFELONG LEARNING AND FLEXICENTRE