Initial Covid-19 Response

Our Covid-19 Response

The covid lockdown was the first major challenge our community enterprise has faced. We harnessed the talents within our communities to ensure we don't just survive the lockdown but learn and grow as a result of it. We continue to support the families we work with as part of our continuity and loss prevention planning. We are also working with the wider community, during these difficult times, to provide a substantial additional stream of services to help them grow through facing adversity.  We are extremely grateful to our funders for supporting our organisation to continue this work from January to May 2021.

Our beneficiaries told us they were struggling with reduced income and financial uncertainty. We support over half of our beneficiary base whilst we diversified our operational capabilities and income streams. We recovered our trading income through diversified services and doubled the social value we generate for every pound of funding we get (c.£6.10 up from £3.00).  We continue to grow both our trading and grant income in line with our beneficiaries needs through a co-design approach. We made a short video about what our beneficiaries tell us they need.

Meeting changing needs in adverse circumstances

We consulted our beneficiaries as the lock down progresses to design and deliver services they would love. We had to reorganised our operations to deliver leaner, more cost effective and highly personalised support to our beneficiaries. What we realised most through covid is our beneficiaries are at the heart of what we do, they're why we are here and our focus in everything we do. 

To support our beneficiaries we digitised some parts of our education provision, to support learning at home. With isolation and associated well-being challenges due to lock-down, we produced high quality activity packs, bringing children and their parents together around craft activities and to celebrate events such as Eid and Christmas. 

With lived experience of the disadvantage we seek to address, we started several services to support the most vulnerable in our communities.  These services address the historic adversity our communities face, which have been highlighted by the covid pandemic. We are now working on making these services as sustainable as possible e.g. we became carbon neutral. At the same time we helped secure almost £100,000 in funding for local charitable organisations. We continue to reach out to people and improve our services using our co-design approach.

Keeping home learning going

We developed a robust online learning provision soon after lock down, enabling both our paying customers and wider beneficiaries to access high quality teaching and learning. We also provided parents with extensive telephone support, enabling them to work with their children at home in productive ways regardless of whether they have curriculum relevant subject specific knowledge. We supported 19 families and 41 children with this provision. We re-opened our covid secure, face to face provision in August 2020 and since then have reduced our video-conferencing provision.

Supporting children isolated at home

To support children's wellbeing we put together high quality activity packs, which we delivered to 15 families. Children used these packs to create science experiments, artwork and generally have fun. We organised online competitions with prizes and celebrated children's weekly achievements. We also ran a video conference youth club, attended by 24 children, which included a show and tell of their work. 

Supporting vulnerable people

We support families living in areas of high deprivation (top 2% nationally by multiple deprivation index) and who are struggling to meet their basic costs. Almost 45% of these families are  'working poor' and have been hit hard by the 20% reduction in income when furloughed. Over 55% of families we work with are on benefits and whilst their children are supposed to receive a meal every day from school, most families are unaware or unable to practically access that provision. The additional £20/week they get from Universal Credit does not stretch far enough to cover these additional meals. 

Reaching out

Whilst our sustainable income generation has been significantly reduced from the lock down, we have more than tripled our spend on reaching out to people to ensure those who need support can access it. We also work through the social networks of people who are in need of support, to support effective targeting of our resources. 

We also worked with our communities to dispel misconceptions and tackle anxieties around the vaccine. 

Sharing resources

We are keen to share our resources and capabilities with others. So, we supported other groups access video conferencing and worked in partnership with community organisations to:
  • deliver hundreds of pounds of food each week to families, 
  • collaborate on funding applications,
  • enable people to access online services, and
  • develop high quality activity packs so people could create moments of happiness during these difficult times. 
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