Real-life Tales of Earning - St Elizabeths Centre

Combining trading with training to achieve mission

• St Elizabeths
• Governance and structure
• Current services
• A new vision
• Social enterprise
• Initial funding
• Splinters
• External business support
• Challenges
• Developing income streams
• The future
• Words of advice from Splinters

St Elizabeths

The St. Elizabeth's Centre in Much Hadham in Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire was founded the Daughters of the Cross of Liege, an order of nuns, in 1903. Originally established as a school for children suffering from epilepsy, the centre is now one of only two specialist centres in the UK, offering care, support and education to 104 adult residents and 80 children with epilepsy and associated disabilities and learning difficulties. Epilepsy is the most common serious neurological condition in the UK. It affects over 300,000 people and is more common among children and older people. The condition is more prolific in individuals with learning difficulties: it is estimated that 30 per cent of people with learning difficulties will also have some form of epilepsy.

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Governance and structure

Although the number of sisters has decreased over the years, the charity is still governed by members of the order who make up the Trustees of the Daughters of the Cross. Over the past 5 years the trustees' emphasis has been on establishing a strong management team including the appointment of a director of care, a finance director and a new chief executive to oversee development and service improvement at the centre. St Elizabeths now has 400 full and part time members of staff. There is also a large volunteer community who contribute over 1,400 working hours a week.

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Current services

St Elizabeths is the only centre in the UK to offer lifelong care and educational services for people with complex epilepsy and learning difficulties. The centre runs a residential school for up to 80 young people for 38 hours a week. A programme of care and residential services has been developed alongside this education provision, such as nursing and therapeutic programmes. The centre now includes a small village of bungalows offering a 'home for life' for 104 full-time residents who need constant health and care support.

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A new vision

The trustees wanted St Elizabeths to develop and support more diverse lifestyles and life opportunities for people with epilepsy and become a national centre of excellence and innovation in its field. So in 2002 the board appointed St Elizabeth's first chief executive Kevin McMullen, whose first task was to instigate a strategic review and new business plan for the centre which would map the future direction of the charity and plan investment in new learning and care services.

Prior to his appointment at St Elizabeth's McMullen was a principle at a community college and chair of Cambridgeshire disability charity Opportunities Without Limits (OWL). McMullen founded OWL following his dismay at the lack of opportunities for disabled people wanting to lead a semi-normal life and wanted to bring innovative new services for service users to St Elizabeths. He used the Government's 2001 'Valuing People' white paper, which outlined out a co-ordinated approach to social inclusion for people experiencing marginalised and limited lifestyles, to guide the strategic review. He says "The Government's Valuing People white paper promotes choice, rights, independence and social inclusion, all the things that underpin our work at St. Elizabeths. But choice is an empty gesture unless people aren't given the richness of opportunity, and that is something that we set out to give our students and residents"

To bring new long-term services to its residents St Elizabeths needed to generate new income streams as it would be unable to cover the cost of new services from it's existing revenue.

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Social enterprise

McMullen recognised that St Elizabeths needed to find a way to allow residents and students to access the three components that he believed constituted a 'normal' life - work, earning and leisure. Although the centre provided an abundance of leisure and recreational opportunities, there was a lack of work and earning potential, so they conducted an audit of St Elizabeths' resources and decided that it had the capacity to develop a range of social enterprise activities that would not only provide supported employment opportunities but also bring significant learning and development opportunities that the centre was currently unable to provide.

For St Elizabeths social enterprise offered the centre the opportunity to fulfill its aim of providing choice, independence, rights and inclusion to its service users, by providing employment opportunities and creating products that provide earning potential for those who find themselves closed off from the mainstream business world. They could also create independent income streams that would mean the projects were self-financing and wouldn't drain resources from St Elizabeths' existing services.

Kevin says that "social enterprise combines trading and training that are entirely complimentary to our therapy and educational programmes."

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Initial funding

St Elizabeths recognised that any social enterprise run by the centre could never compete in the open labour market and would never be sustained just by income from selling products or services. It also wanted to keep the enterprise geared towards learning and training rather than just meeting profit targets.

McMullen approached the local Learning and Skills council (LSC) with a plan as to how social enterprises could fit in with the LSC's national agenda of lifelong learning. The LSC agreed that the enterprises were the perfect vehicle to deliver training and learning opportunities for people with epilepsy and learning difficulties.

The LSC awarded a £143,000 grant for St Elizabeths to start up and run three social enterprises over a three-year period. This would allow St Elizabeths to not only launch the projects but also create defined programmes of learning and development that would take St Elizabeth's epileptic service users away from a residential setting into a working environment where they could learn new skills and contribute to the work of the social enterprise.

After winning the funding St Elizabeths launched three social enterprises - Ashville, a horticultural business selling plants and shrubs, the Art House, a business making ceramics and artwork and Splinters, a furniture restoration project.

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Splinters furniture restoration

The idea for Splinters emerged from an examination of St Elizabeths' existing resources. At that time the centre was running a charity shop in nearby Bishops Stortford, where furniture was in high demand. However the shop was struggling to find space to store any furniture donated and was having to turn product away. The shop had identified a gap in the market for cheap second-hand furniture and Splinters was launched to take advantage of this retail opportunity.

Instead of continuing to run the shop, St Elizabeths ceased the £8,500 lease on the shop and used this money to lease a workshop on an industrial unit near the centre. Splinters was set up as a furniture restoration business, where residents renovated and cleaned up furniture donated by the public and sold it to customers visiting a showroom at the workshop.

Splinters is predominantly run as a training service for residents or students at St Elizabeth's. Training programmes at the workshop are based around Mencap's development guidelines for people with epilepsy and learning difficulties that set out essential skills such as decision-making, following instructions and relating to others.

The LSC funding covers all the training provided at Splinters. The workshop at Splinters has the capacity to take up to 8 St Elizabeth workers at any one time. This often varies because of treatments and therapy session, but the workshop usually has between 4-6 residents working throughout the day.

People working at Splinters carry out a variety of renovation jobs including painting, sanding and cleaning furniture donated to the project. This work is interspersed with one-to-one and group sessions with nursing and social care staff working on communication and interpersonal skills.

St Elizabeths covers the costs and wages of all staff working at Splinters. These include a business support manager, a project manager and nursing and teaching support. It also continues to divert the money previously spent on the charity shop in Bishops Stortford to pay the lease on the Splinters shop.

Splinters receives donations of furniture from the general public that it then renovates and sells through its workshop. An advertisement in the Yellow Pages has proved successful in drawing customers and furniture donations to the shop.

With the cost of the workshop covered by St Elizabeth's, Splinters could develop its workshop as a place fit to deliver training and support services. It maxmised this as a resource by ensuring that customers had the space to view furniture through creating a showroom next to the workshop.

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External business support

An external business consultant working on a pro rata basis donated time to help St Elizabeths draw up a business plan for Splinters. This plan was also applied to the other two social enterprises.

Because the social enterprises focused on training and did not aim to become profitable businesses through the sale of products, other targets were factored into the business plan. For instance instead of setting ambitious financial targets, the business looked at how time working at Splinters could decrease the costs of psychotherapy for residents. So if through working at Splinters one resident could cut back on one hour of psychotherapy a week, this would equate to a saving of up to £3,000 a year for St Elizabeths.

John , the Business Support Manager for Splinters says "Drawing up a business plan was a real challenge. It's difficult to put financial worth on social benefit. But putting monetary value on the work we were doing helped us maintain our belief that Splinters could work as a sustainable business."

Splinter's business plan now revolves around the learning and development achievements of its workers. Not only does this reinforce the social base of the project, but also ensures that Splinters is justifying its LSC funding and maximising the chance of getting funding renewed in 2005. Income from sale of furniture is still perceived as a supplementary income stream. 

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Challenges

The biggest training challenge facing Splinters is how to ensure that people are given the right choice, opportunities and challenges. Professional nursing and care staff work alongside the residents to ensure that the furniture restoration training is complimenting other learning and care work.

Creating the right balance of training and trading is also essential. Residents have to be comfortable with interacting with customers and ensuring that furniture is in a good condition to sell on. Ensuring that the workshop is a good social environment is also essential. The Business Develoment Manager, John says "Although furniture restoration is obviously the reason we're here, it's often times like tea-break when we see the best progress. Just taking a list of who wants what and interacting with other workers can be a huge break-through and can demonstrate the social benefits of Splinter's self-sustaining business environment."

Like other epilepsy centres, St Elizabeths was built in a remote rural area away from built-up residential areas. This means that the workshop is not easily accessible to the buying public. Although the project received more than enough donated furniture, Splinters still needs to do more to raise awareness of its shop and products to buying customers.

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Developing income streams

Learning and Skills Council funding: The initial three-year funding is still the main source of sustainable income for Splinters. LSC money covers training and development grants for each St Elizabeth resident working at Splinters. St Elizabeths is hoping to set up a new college for older students between 19-25, which will work to the same funding model. Splinters will hope to gain additional LSC funding from promoting its work delivering work-based learning to an older age group.

Furniture sales: Sales of furniture total around £12,000 per year, which covers the cost of the workshop, materials and part of the lease. Splinters hopes to increase this by the end of 2004.

Selling to St Elizabeths: Splinters has started to sell its furniture directly to St. Elizabeths to help furnish its residential bungalows and school facilities. St Elizabeths buys the furniture at the same price as other customers.]

Increasing Splinter's customer base: Splinters has cultivated a healthy relationship with the local press that has encouraged more customers to visit the centre.

Tie-in with local YWCA: Splinters has struck a distribution deal with a charity shop in nearby Harlow run by the YMCA. Splinters supplies furniture to the shop and the YWCA takes a commission fee before handing the rest of the profits back to St Elizabeths.

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The future

Now that Splinters has been running successfully for two years, the management is looking to diversify the project's services and increase capacity.

Expand into new areas

Splinters is exploring a possible expansion into furniture recycling. It has started talks with Herefordshire Council regarding new European Union targets for recycling. Splinters hopes to strike a deal to receive furniture from council collections and reduce the landfill taxes incurred by the Council. The deal would mean that Splinters could start a recycling and reuse business, which would be a good addition to the furniture restoration programmes. This new work would also be a lot more time efficient and cost effective as furniture recycling and reuse mainly entails basic cleaning instead of stripping and repainting.

Expand training income

Chief executive McMullen is in talks with the local social services departments about the training that Splinters and St Elizabeths' other social enterprises can offer people outside the centre. It wants to sell training programmes in furniture restoration, horticulture and ceramics to social service day-care centres who could use St Elizabeths as part of learning and care programmes.

Launch specialist services

The project wants to take advantage of the skills and experience it has accumulated through its time running its furniture restoration business. It wants to branch out into consultancy and training for other voluntary groups working with similar service users who want to launch similar sustainable training projects

Move to bigger property

Splinters is limited in the number of people it can train because of the space limitations of its workshop. Next year it may look to move to a larger better-equipped venue where it will be able to accept more training grants and accommodate new work such as the proposed recycling and reuse work.

New retail outlet

St Elizabeths wants to take advantage of the flourishing business opportunities presented by the expansion of the local area. Bishops Stortford is set to benefit economically from the proposed development of Stansted Airport that should bring new people and businesses into the area. Splinters is exploring the potential of opening a retail outlet closer to town to sell renovated furniture. However this is a risky move - the price of leases will undoubtedly rise and the project must be confident that it can sell enough to cover the lease and protect its existing services.

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Words of advice from Splinters

• Understand your capabilities - think laterally about what you could offer people. Look at the training needs of your service users and see if you can fill that gap.
• Research the competition and look at the resources of your local area
• Set realistic deadlines. Don't expect a project to be a success in the first 12 months, set a target for 2-3 years.
• If in doubt, get external advice.
• Have confidence in your organisations ability to run a sustainable business and just make the decision to do it. You won't know if you don't try.

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