CAF Resilience - one year on
Reflecting on the last year, Dave Close, the charity’s director, said:
“The difference that this last year on the programme has made is that it has helped build the infrastructure for the organisation we are becoming: first adding carefully to our management and admin staff capacity, then supporting our development of the core systems which build the platform for our work with young people.”
He said that before starting the programme, the organisation’s biggest fear was that there were many factors pushing them to grow the scope of their work and size of the team, but that this growth could undermine the quality of their work.
Now, he says, their CAF Resilience work has helped build a new management team that has increased self confidence and skill, and helped them work towards increasing alternative sources of funding, such as traded income.
In the last year, the charity was also able to roll out a ‘Developing Leadership’ training course for managers, working with the whole team to create a new approach and template for line management, while renewing job descriptions for more clarity on who is responsible for what.
In addition to that, the leadership team brought about various changes to internal processes including revised practice on paying staff on residential weekends, a new incident reporting system, and substantial GDPR work due to the nature of their work with young people and sensitive information.