What did we achieve?

Here’s a quick round up of some of the things we achieved together.

• £85,000 Community Grant funding given to 89 organisations
• £131,000 external funding secured to support our community programmes
• £526,000 external funding secured to support our employment programmes
• 303 people supported into employment
• 689 people onto training
• 548 people with CV checks and other employability support
• 189 people attended Create self-employment training
• 10 Create mentors provided 125 support sessions, totalling 207 hours, to 45 mentees
• 68 businesses began trading following Create self-employment course
• 2 apprenticeships supported
• 13 jobs following our Abri Work Academies (AWA) with Tesco and Southern Supply Network
• 13 young people supported into apprenticeships
• 1,200 one-to-one careers interviews with young people
• 150 aspirational mentoring sessions with young people
• 1,510 meetings with parents providing information on their child's post 16 pathways and opportunities
• 111 group workshops providing information, advice and guidance about apprenticeships, decision making for options, further education pathways
• 2 national awards for Create, our self-employment provision
• £3,745,372 total social value impact*

But numbers don’t tell the whole story. Like how 11-year-old Rogan set up his Bee Happy campaign in Gosport to lift spirits and provide activities to do at home. Or how our employment team joined a task force to support people facing redundancy as the Oscar Mayer factory closes in Chard. Or the vital support that Swaythling Saturday Free Food Club provides to the local community by working with local shops and donations.

It has been a difficult year, but through our work we’ve seen the community come together. Take a look at our three pillars – community empowerment, employment, and health and wellbeing – to hear more about these and the many other fantastic projects that took place.

It’s what we use to understand how the work we do impacts people’s lives. We use HACT’s Housing Data Standards to work out our social value. So, for every £1 we invest into a project, we use their figures to tell us what this equates in monetary terms to an uplift in someone’s life.

As expected, the pandemic has had an impact on that. When lockdown began we weren’t able to continue with many of the community and employment-based activities we’d planned. But we were in a strong place to adapt how we deliver them, focussing on partnership working, supporting local hubs to distribute supplies, food and more. We also leveraged additional funding to support activities and awarded community grants.

Working together with our customers and partners meant that communities had the support they needed during the pandemic (and continue to, now). But because we had to temporarily pause or adapt services, we weren’t able to measure social value in the usual way. Our community cafes usually generate a large part of social value, however during the lockdowns we had to close or change the way we operated them.

We aspire to deliver a social value ratio of £1: £12.50 for health and wellbeing across our 13 key neighbourhoods. This year, we achieved £1: £5.74. So, we have a way to go. But we’re ambitious and know we can get there.