Impact of involvement
Being active and getting involved in your local community can help you learn new skills, make new friends, improve the environment in which you live and can also make you feel better about your life.
These outcomes are just side-effects of being on the committee of a local village hall or volunteering to help at the youth group but they are very important outcomes in themselves for anyone who has no self-confidence, mental ill-health or who feels socially excluded.
In the same way, getting involved in how Carr-Gomm is run – through helping to recruit new staff, to commenting on policies and seeing changes being made on the ground – can greatly improve the overall quality of life of our clients.
For example, encouraging a client to be on the editorial board of the client newsletter can lead to them improving their reading and writing and IT skills, gaining confidence travelling on public transport to meetings, making friends with the others on the team and learning to organise themselves and work as a team.
The new skills and confidence gained this way can lead to clients organising their own trips out, feeling able to join a club or group near home and eventually to move on from supported housing, safe in the knowledge that they have the skills to budget and understand their bills and tenancy agreements and the confidence to ask for help with they need it.
In short, getting involved can have a seriously positive impact on the enjoyment that a person gets out of life.
Having a voice
Carr-Gomm chose "Having a Voice" as the theme for our 40th birthday year in 2005 because the consultation that we carried out with staff, clients external stakeholders, showed that client involvement was key to our work. This is reflected in our new mission statement, which states that we will support our clients to create the future that they want for themselves. Go to Our Mission to see the full mission statement.
We believe that clients having a voice in their own lives and in the running of the services that they receive, will help people to move more quickly towards a positive future.
Measuring the impact
We are keen to provide evidence about how Carr-Gomm helps people to improve their quality of life. A group of staff are working on a number of indicators that can show that the work we do is having its required outcomes.
Go to Outcomes page for more information, which will be updated as information becomes available. Go to Monitoring involvement for more on how we measure the quality of the work we do with clients.
Impact on Carr-Gomm
Carr-Gomm’s staff and the organisation as a whole also benefit from more clients getting involved.
Staff can find that:
- Improved relationships with the people they support leads to greater job satisfaction
- Housing and service management problems are reduced as a result of users having a greater sense of ownership of their home
The organisation gains
- The capacity to improve services in line with clients’ needs and interests
- A firm basis for Best Value and other Quality measures
- Accountability to clients
- The ability to tap into and make effective use of clients’ skills and knowledge
- An increased profile and reputation in the sector
