Investing in Success
Investing in Success
VAF were the first funding agency to provide 'Investment Support' to funded organisations aimed at driving up performance and success.
The package of support varies across different funding programmes and responds to the needs of the projects funded. Different support elements include:
- support for the planning and delivering of projects;
- support for monitoring and compliance with grant conditions;
- support for project evaluation;
- facilitation of networks across projects which promote integration and learning and/facilitating learning opportunities, such as: managing volunteers with additional support needs, mainstreaming equalities etc.
Providing dedicated support enables VAF to manage risk attached to grant making in a practical way.
Providing support also builds the capacity of the organisation to manage the grant and manage challenges as well as building their capacity to engage with a funding agency.
Another important rationale for investment support is to support organisations to be successful and be able to communicate this success.
In undertaking the investment support VAF develops a learning culture within and between projects, enabling the learning from individual projects to be developed to give information for programme level learning and in some cases policy development in external agencies.
We know that our funded projects welcome our support:
“We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for the support and interest you have shown in our project over the last 12 months. It has been such a positive experience – VAF really do excel as funders in terms of meaningful engagement, support and feedback” Dundee Carers.
Evaluating the Impact of Investment Support
However, at VAF we also wished to know how our support enables community based organisations to deliver their funded projects and hence make changes in their community? So in June 2006, we recruited a team of Community Researchers from our funded projects to undertake a programme of research looking at not only the impact of our work (details of this can be found in the learning section – what is the impact and value of the investment support we provide?
The link to the report can be found here Maximising Success
Taking a Peer led approach to Learning and Support
VAF have been pioneering a peer approach to our research. As explained here and within our Learning section (<link to this>) VAF have involved community researchers in taking forward research into the long term impact of our work and also the impact of the investment support itself. Community researchers were recruited from VAF funded projects and played an integral role in the design and delivery of the research. As well as bringing their insight to the process through their involvement, they helped encourage the involvement of their peers within funded projects.
Importantly to VAF, we were providing a learning opportunity to individuals within the funded projects.
The Involving Community Researchers report goes into more detail on the lessons learnt in involving researchers within our recent research programme. The main conclusions from this were:
- The community researchers have each developed new research skills, which they can use in their own organisations and projects.
- The Community Researcher approach has increased VAF’s capacity to undertake research by building the skills of the team
- The Community Researcher approach has also created a research resource for the individual participants and their organisations.
- The additional data developed through the training sessions provided different insights into the research questions and the added richness to the findings and conclusions from the research.
We are also now taking this approach into supporting project based evaluation through the training and facilitation of peer evaluators.