Partnership is key. We know we can’t do this on our own.
We aspire to deliver a social value ratio of £1: £12.50 for health and wellbeing across our 13 key neighbourhoods. Over the next year, we’re going to work with our supply chain to improve our social value. We’ll also work with our partners to increase what we do, with a particular focus on inactivity, mental health and social isolation, increasing the use of Café 1759 and Round About Café as hubs for opportunities.
We’re focused on impact. We know what our communities needed changed during the pandemic. And they’ll continue to evolve as we find our way into the new normal and beyond. So, we’ll regularly check that our Community Investment Plans reflect what they need.
Supporting our communities as we transition out of lockdowns and into a new normal is going to be a priority for us. Our Employment Team will be supporting people to get ahead of the game, helping secure jobs, training to reach better jobs, starting up their own businesses, and raising aspirations through our work with schools.
We’ll have a focus on digital skills for employment too. We’re going to be working with Cosmic, a social enterprise offering digital skills training and services, on Digital Citizen. This project will upskill our customers’ digital skills, enabling them to operate confidently within the world of work. The project includes sections on how to motivate customers to engage with the digital world too. It launched in June 2021.
We’re also offering digital skills training to our customers, through our digiReady programme. We want to help customers connect with family and friends, stay safe online, and learn how to manage their tenancy on our portals.
Our Community Investment Team will also be back out into the community, working with you to deliver and support projects that will help make your lives better. We’ll have £65,000 available in our Community Fund to support local organisations, voluntary groups and residents’ associations to deliver projects that improve lives in our communities.
We’ll be scaling up our Good Grub Club too. Over the course of the last year, we have worked towards running the club more efficiently and across multiple investment zones. In order to do this, we’ve created a centralised model of operation for the club, allowing us to streamline the preparation work required and make our delivery more efficient and consistent across our zones. This model is now being used and adapted to set up new Good Grub Clubs both within Abri (in Salisbury) and by external partner organisations.
We have also worked closely with Southampton University to carry out an in-depth evaluation of aims, impacts and sustainability of the club, which has been both insightful and crucial in shaping our future planning.
Good Grub Club offers an excellent opportunity for families to gain confidence and skills around cooking, supporting them to make good choices and improve their diets that continues beyond the sessions. The evidence was clear that families value their time in GGC, with the added benefit of making new friendships and getting children to try and enjoy new foods.
Lecturer in GIS and Health Geography, Southampton University
The evaluation solidified that we are successful in our aims to help families cook nutritious foods on a budget and that behaviour changes are occurring beyond the club. It also taught us that our volunteers are keen to be more involved with the club, to help plan and run the sessions. We are currently working on incorporating this into our model, offering a volunteer framework to ensure our communities are at the forefront of the project and creating a more sustainable future for the club.
There’ll be lots for customers and partners to get involved in over the next year. We’ll be updating where we are on our Community Investment Plans every six months.
