Project
The Social Mobility Foundation’s senior leadership team had set themselves an ambitious timescale to create their new three-year strategic plan, so the Eastside People team got things up and running fast.
They delivered a series of workshops alongside surveys involving different teams as well as the board members to start developing the charity’s strategic priorities.
“We wanted to ensure that everyone at the Social Mobility Foundation was excited and energised by creating a strategy,” says Eastside People’s Alice Memminger. “The team was really engaged and enthusiastic about the whole process, so they were really positive sessions.”
From the start, it was important to the charity to embed an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) perspective throughout the process, and Eastside People’s Mona Vadher was brought in to support this. She ensured that the workshops and communications with staff were accessible and that everyone felt comfortable contributing, as well as helping the charity to consider how inclusive it could be when seeking out the young people it aimed to support, working with funders and partners, and in its campaigning work.
Furthermore, the perspective needed to be built into the charity’s impact measurement by assessing how well it was reaching its target audiences of young people, particularly those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as well as considering how this characteristic intersected with others such as ethnicity, disability and gender.
Alice Dee highlights that during the workshops the staff benefited from Eastside People’s approach to facilitating conversations and challenging their thinking.
“Alice and Ruth were very good at asking targeted questions, bringing in people at different levels of the organisation, reflecting back, and cutting through the noise,” she says. “We often framed our conversations around practical delivery, and Eastside People could reframe these ideas strategically…There was this miraculous moment where we’d done all the talking, and Eastside People came back and had captured everything in a more strategic way than we could articulate it.”
For many charities, the idea of incorporating an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) approach in everything they do can be overwhelming, but Eastside People made it approachable for the Social Mobility Foundation.
“Mona was good at helping us identify the most urgent and important things to focus on, so that we could prioritise and bake in EDI throughout everything that we do, in a manageable way for our organisation’s capacity and skill set,” says Alice Dee.
Solution
The strategy was completed in October 2023 following engagement and consultation with the charity’s staff team and other stakeholders, a review of all the charity’s key documents, strategic planning workshops, and building a framework for impact measurement.
After that, Eastside People provided several months of consultancy to help the Social Mobility Foundation to implement the new strategy, according to the roadmap that had been created during the process. This included coaching and mentoring to ensure that the senior leadership team had the expertise they needed to take it forward, facilitated workshops, and production of a monitoring and evaluation process and reports. It was important to ensure that the strategy was cascaded throughout the charity.
Eastside People’s Alice Memminger continues to offer ongoing technical support for Alice Dee to implement the strategy, including business planning, monitoring and reporting. They speak around three times a month and Alice Dee says that she values Alice Memminger’s breadth of experience in how strategies are implemented in other organisations, which means she can offer examples of different approaches and solutions.
The charity’s staff really “dived in and embraced the process”, says Alice Memminger. She adds: “The organisation has matured amazingly. The way the staff approach things strategically is a transformation, and I feel like we can step away and they will do really well. They know how to focus their resources, and they understand which activities really deliver impact.”
Alice Dee agrees that the charity has made a huge step forward, and she credits it to Eastside People’s capacity-building approach. “Eastside People do the process with you,” she says. “Some management consultants might come in and tell you what to do, but Eastside People focus on building organisational capacity and your confidence in what you can do. This has made what we’re doing much more sustainable, and that’s ultimately improved our entire organisation.”
She adds: “We’ve had a really positive experience; it was an investment in the organisation, and we are continuing to work with Eastside People to help ensure that the Social Mobility Foundation really benefits from the new strategy that has been devised.”
