Hillingdon Community Trust has now been established for five years and in December 2007, the Trustees commissioned consultants to carry out an independent evaluation to examine the Trust’s work and impact to date.
The evaluation report has now been presented to the Trustees. It gives a very positive evaluation of the Trust’s progress and some useful recommendations for the Trust’s future programme. These will be considered by the Trustees over the coming months.
The main recommendations are set out below. The full report is is available for download on the forms and downloads page.
STRATEGY
- That this year’s review of the strategy is carried out during an away-day for all Trustees, facilitated by a consultant who can help to generate a clear statement of what HCT is seeking to achieve in Hillingdon in relation to each of its funding categories. The Trust could consider ways in which they involve the voluntary sector in the refinement of the strategic plan.
- During its strategic review, the Trust might consider establishing two new initiatives: one for young people and another on community cohesion/integration in the light of the changing needs in the borough. If the idea is believed to be worth investigating, Trustees and staff should hold preliminary discussions with the local authority and other relevant agencies on a co-ordinated strategy.
- During its strategic review, the Trustees could discuss ways in which HCT could engage more proactively with its voluntary sector. Some of the options are shown in Chapter Five.
PROMOTION
- The Trust seems to be sufficiently well known amongst agencies that might apply for funding but HCT might plan for a special one-off proactive promotion exercise if and when it decides to implement the above two initiatives.
- The website is the Trust’s most important means of promotion. There are options for making it an interactive source of information about the grants already given, by holding additional case study material of successful projects.
FUNDING PROGRAMMES
- The Trust might consider how best to invest in ‘one large project’ which could be associated with one of the above mentioned initiatives.
- The Trust could review its core funding strategy and consider implementing one of the options shown in Chapter Three.
PROCEDURES
- The Trust might consider ways in which it could continue to improve perceptions of its transparency: this might include the provision of more information on the website about its strategic objectives; a more detailed description of its funding categories; descriptions of some of the reasons for rejection of applications that they have experienced over the years; and some background information about Trustees and their roles in the assessment committees.
- The Trust might consider additional ways of continuing to improve transparency by providing more explicit feedback to grantees following assessment, in line with best practice procedures adopted by some funders.
- The Trust should continue to review the assessment process, for example, with the Director producing a note on each application indicating the extent to which it fulfils the Trust’s objectives.
- The Trust should continue to review the assessment process by developing a flexible assessment form for use by Trustees during assessment meetings.
MONITORING AND EVALUATION
- The Trust should continue to review and improve its monitoring and evaluation procedures by requiring projects that receive an annual grant of £50,000 and above to provide more evidence of their achievements, as shown in Chapter Three.
- The Trust might consider adjusting the application form to incorporate a statement of expected outcomes and then rephrasing one of the questions in its monitoring form to encourage projects to produce outcome data, as discussed in Chapter Three.
CAPACITY BUILDING
- The Trust might consider different ways of bringing the capacity building programme in-house, perhaps by holding contracts with a small number of consultants who could be called upon to provide support in promotion, strategic planning, monitoring and evaluation and fundraising.
- The Trust might consider funding specific training courses on the above mentioned topics.
SUSTAINABILITY
- The Trust could consider ways in which they might encourage business people on to the Board of Trustees in order to meet the challenges of sustainability and improve contact with business.
- During this year’s strategic review, Trustees could also incorporate a discussion of the three options for sustainability.
|
