Chapter 9 continued

Louise inherited an organisation which had become scaled down in recent years with just seven members of staff providing administration and reception support and running information, employment and training services. The post of Chief Executive had been vacant for more than two years and so the organisation was lacking leadership and strategic direction.

However, Louise could see the potential for growth and the need for the services that were being provided as well as the need to provide new and more services. But first of all there was the small issue of funding:

“Within in a few days it became apparent that the organisation had no funding beyond March 31. So having just walked into the organisation, I was already facing a potential redundancy situation along with all the other members of staff. My priority was to secure funding beyond March 31 of that year.”

The management experience which Louise brought from other organisations and sectors meant that she was able to turn things around fairly quickly, in spite of the initial uphill struggle. Existing services had to demonstrate that they were hitting the performance targets of their contracts in order to justify new funding bids. Staff were supported with training and encouraged to change the culture of the organisation so that it became “procurement ready” and quality assurance systems were put in place:

“Things like quality systems, policies, procedures, management arrangements, meetings, standard things that need to be in place in an organisation to enable it to run effectively, performance management arrangements, staff appraisal systems all of that had to be put in place because it was not there.

“Beyond March 31, when the initial need to ensure the organisation survived the next tranche really was to make sure that the BDRC was procurement ready, that organisations like Birmingham City Council and the Learning and Skills Council and whoever would be happy to contract with us and we could demonstrate our ability to deliver and manage contracts, so a lot of work was required in the first 12 months.”

If some of this starts to sound a long way away from the chain of events which started with Paul Hunt’s letter to The Guardian in 1972 and led some years later to Bob Findlay sitting alone in a school hall in Balsall Heath wondering if anyone would turn up to the inaugural meeting of BDRG, we should, perhaps, remind ourselves that at around the same time as Louise had arrived at the centre, in early 2005, across the city both Disability West Midlands and Birmingham Coalition of Disabled People were struggling for survival, in large parts because of infrastructure and leadership issues and arguably because of a failure to demonstrate a working business plan.

Within a year, both organisations would be gone, whilst BDRC was now starting to go from strength to strength. Like it or not, for a medium-sized third sector organisation like BDRC to survive, becoming sharper in terms of professional standards, financial accountability, entrepreneurial outlook and overall business sense were essential requirements.

Another of Louise’s innovations was to take the strands of commercially viable services which had been previously developed by workers like Steve Blick, Janet Higgins, Debbie Nunn and Elaine Watson and bring them together under the remit of a new department within the organisation – a third strand of the organisation’s services aptly titled Business Services.

The type of things that fitted into Business Services of course were not necessarily new areas of work within BDRC or the wider disability movement, such as disability equality training, access auditing, disability consultancy, arranging accessible events, etc., but the idea of formalising and delivering them in a more strategic and commercially astute way was a significant development for BDRC, it also built on the social enterprise related ambitions of the organisation.

If there had been any sense of trepidation or uncertainty in the past about, firstly, whether to and secondly, how to develop a business model from the foundations of a community and rights based ideological agenda, BDRC was now making a clear statement of intent for the future. Louise recounts the development of the department:

“There was a small element of business activity taking place, which sat in the Employment and Training Division at that time. Two staff members worked in that division on the Disability Equality Training contract which BDRC still holds today to train taxi drivers in Birmingham.

“But that was really the only contract that BDRC held at that time and it became evident that we did get the odd enquiry from other organisations around Disability Equality Training and whether we could put other related types of training on. It seemed a good idea to explore that opportunity further.

“Beyond that, BDRC has always hired out its rooms. Organisations have been able to hire our facilities for meetings or conferences and what we have here is pretty accessible compared to most in Birmingham, so there was obviously a market around that.

“I looked into this in more detail and thought it would be quite nice to pull together a new section which looked very much at developing BDRC business really.

“We pulled together that taxi training contract, the rooms that we hired, the tenants that were based here and looked at expanding that further, particularly opportunities for training in Disability and Equality or training on the Disability Discrimination Act, doing access audits for example and other consultancy work.

“I put a plan together and presented it to the Board of Directors here and they certainly wanted to see it happen. The plan was in line with what they wanted to do, so they said ‘if you want to do that then go away and get the funding for this to happen’.

“So I worked on an application to the Big Lottery Fund and I was successful in securing three years funding to create a Business Development Manager post and an assistant post and, because we already had the disability and equality taxi training contract, I managed to secure that for a further three years and we were able to establish a post of Access Auditor/Trainer.

“We were able to create a new section comprising of three members of staff to take this forward. The plan was that after three years the Business section would be self-sustaining through all the contracts that it was securing, etc. and that any profit we made could be used to deliver our other services.”

With new money also coming in to develop the Employment and Training Service, in June 2006 the workforce expanded quite quickly with an influx of another nine new members of staff, a huge change for BDRC at that point in time with more new members of staff coming in than had actually been working there at the end of May.

Whilst there was always plenty of qualitative anecdotal evidence to show that service users valued the services provided by BDRC over many years, there were now big changes taking place, not just in

Birmingham, but across the country in the way that local authorities were going to fund the third sector, with contracts and service level agreements based increasingly on carefully monitored targets and stringently controlled accountability of expenditure.

The days when long term core grants were well-meaningfully thrown at groups who were, for whatever reason, flavour of the month with their local statutory department officers or politicians, had come to an end and whether the playing field was equal for all or not, disabled people’s organisations would have to lift their game alongside everyone else.