Together with families: building a strategy for the Home-Start federation
Home-Start in action
As Home-Start approaches its 50th anniversary, Lucent was engaged to help develop the first ever federation-wide strategy.
Lin Hinnigan, Chair of Home-Start UK, reflects:
“It was a critical moment for us to come together as a whole federation, reflecting on the experiences of families through the pandemic, and what Home-Start’s distinctive offer for families was going to be in future.”
To kick off the process, Lucent supported Home-Start to develop fresh insight into their work. This started by identifying Home-Start’s assets and offer – what we called ingredients of its ‘secret sauce’. We then worked to identify where Home-Start fits in the eco-system of support for families and children. And finally we considered how the network was working together and what learning could be taken from other federated charities. It was a collaborative process, ensuring space for sharing reflections and learning, as well as some hard data-crunching to test and challenge assumptions.
Engaging people in this process was key and we supported Home-Start to:
Bring together a Strategy Advisory Group that met five times to guide the process and ensure it was inclusive
Hear the views of over 100 families who use their services
Hold 12 workshops involving staff, trustees and volunteers from more than 100 local Home-Starts from across the UK
Survey more than 70 stakeholders, including health visitors social workers, leaders of charities, networks and federations.
Five key insights emerged from the process and informed the development of Home-Start’s new strategy, which was launched on 9th May 2022.
1. The value of simply being there for families
Families, volunteers and partners all talked about the value of Home-Start’s core offer of peer support of families which was friendly, non-judgemental, flexible, and practical.
During the pandemic, families reflected how Home-Start volunteers had adapted quickly, helping with food parcels, home-schooling or phone calls. The true value of simply being there for families, whatever that meant in a rapidly changing situation, shone through. However, it was clear that it was not possible to reach the many families who would benefit from Home—Start’s support.
2. Not competing with other children’s charities
In common with many organisations, Home-Start faced an uphill battle in getting this core offer funded. All too often, the pull from commissioners and funders was in different directions – to deliver particular interventions or meet time-bound targets. Given the financial pressures, Home-Starts face choices: should they or shouldn’t they respond to that pull?
Figure 1: Home Start and other children’s charities
Having generated a list of other children’s charities in a workshop, we mapped Home-Start’s field by size of organisations. You can see these in Figure 1 on the left (if you click any of the visualisations in this blog you will go to Flourish where you can see more detail).
This showed the dominance of a few larger children’s charities. Home-Starts by comparison have much smaller incomes and rely significantly on volunteers. However, collectively as a federation, they have a similar scale to some of the other children’s charities.
Figure 2: income mix across children’s charities
Next we looked at the sources of income for those children’s charities, particularly their income from government. Figure 2 (on the right). This showed that these large charities are delivering significant government contracts – and that there is no shortage of competition for those contracts.
The exercise highlighted that Home-Start’s offer and strengths were different. Their scale and volunteer base – over 10,000 people, locally-based charities, and a focus on supporting families that need help but are not in crisis, meant that Home-Start were generally better-placed to complement the work of other major children’s charities than to compete with them to deliver contracts.
3. Partnerships are the future
Looking forward , Home-Start realised that they would need to draw on other resources and that partnerships were one of the most important ways to do that.
During the pandemic, local Home-Starts had worked closely with local foodbanks, citizen’s advice, women’s charities, bereavement charities and other groups to meet emergent needs. An initial mapping of those partners highlighted the wide range of organisations Home-Start was in touch with at that time (see Figure 3 below).
Continuing to work with others – and particularly broadening the range of partners – would enable Home-Start to offer holistic support to families and to reach families and communities they might otherwise have struggled to access. Building on its excellent track record of corporate partnerships – with brands like John Lewis, BT and White Stuff – that are willing to invest in communities would also help Home-Start to achieve its ambitions.
Figure 3: Home-Start’s other partners
4 Revisiting what needs to be local and what can be done centrally
One of the most fascinating parts of the process was speaking to other federated charities and national networks. In particular, we sought to understand the balance between centralised functions held in the charity HQ with local responsiveness and autonomy. Data on other federated charities showed that Home-Start had a much smaller central body than others and that local charities had been operating in a more devolved way. See Figure 4 below.
Figure 4: Charity federations and networks with central charity highlighted
This meant Home-Start was likely to be missing out on some of the economies of scale achieved in other organisations. In very practical terms, this means ensuring that you have an answer to a killer question posed by another charity’s CEO was: what do you need to create/purchase only once? There were numerous examples ranging from template training resources to online volunteer portals to supplier contracts. And it means balancing this with the many benefits to keeping things local – face-to-face training, community fundraising and the aforementioned partnership working with local public services - which should be retained. With functions such as fundraising, promoting awareness and campaigning it means finding the mix of central and local action that delivers most impact.
5. Together with families
The 18 month long strategy process served as an insight in itself. Working more closely together and getting the benefit of so many people’s expertise, experience and perspectives made the process far richer and more enjoyable.
As Home-Start UK’s CEO Peter Grigg commented:
“I’m enormously grateful to be working with such amazing colleagues across and beyond Home-Start. Where we’ve arrived is that we’re definitely in it together for families and we want to continue working in this way. For me, the process was a really important opportunity to hold a mirror up to ourselves and our current practice. And all the feedback from families, partners and Lucent’s data work helped us move beyond anecdote to real insights about what will help us on the next stage of our journey.”
The Home-Start strategic framework was published on the 9th May 2022. To find out more, visit the Home-Start UK website here.