Working to ensure a sustainable future

When the parents and carers of young people with severe learning difficulties set up the Orchardville Society in 1981, they could not have foreseen that over 20 years later, young disabled people would be working in a business run by the Society that is on target to turn over almost a quarter of a million pounds.

Yet this is exactly what has happened. It is a result of the Orchardville Society having looked to the social economy model, not only to raise funds to supplement grant income, but also to provide a better quality and quantity of work experience for its trainees.

The Orchardville Business Centre is one of a number of the Society’s social economy initiatives. In addition to providing training and employment opportunities, the Business Centre has been able to improve its income year on year through the excellent quality of service it provides to its customers.

The Orchardville Society is a registered charity, providing vocational and employment services to people with learning disabilities throughout south and east Belfast.

As the employment service grew and developed in the 1990s, the Society began for the first time attracting work experience placements for students and trainees in ‘white collar’ jobs. A regular request from trainees at this time was to work in an office. As a result of this, the Society believed there was a need to develop a programme that provided a pathway for students and trainees to move into the area of back office administration.

The Orchardville Business Centre was developed to meet this need by marrying onsite business services with key nationally accredited vocational qualifications, plus a package of external work placements, the aim being to improve the skills of trainees available for external work placements.

There are now four full-time staff employed in the Business Centre and they work with 40 trainees. The Business Centre manager, Ernie Spence, has overall control and is responsible for both the business side and the training issues. He is assisted by two contract supervisors whose main responsibility is to ensure that contracts are completed on time, within budget and to each customer’s requirements. They must also ensure that trainees receive the appropriate level of training in all areas of the Business Centre’s activities. Further support is provided by an administrative assistant, who has a key role in terms of design, pricing and updating the centre’s accounts.

The trainees do not attend every day; on average 12 attend the centre at any one time. This means that in general, each trainee will attend the business centre for two days a week, have an external work placement for a further two days and attend college on the fifth day. This demonstrates that the key focus is progression to external work placements through the Society’s programmes and the achievement of national accredited qualifications.

Success story

And what of the success rate? According to Alan Thomson, Director of the Orchardville Society, each year between 15 and 25 people with a learning disability progress into one of the various employment options from all of the Society’s programmes. Of these, several trainees from the Business Centre will access paid employment.

One exciting recent development, set up initially in partnership with the Laganside Corporation, has been the provision of a dedicated job finding service. This service is designed to link directly with employers in order to access work experience placements and arrange employment options.

With training systems and national accredited qualifications in place, the Society must now make a quantum leap forward to increase the number of paid employment options for student trainees.

Services

The Business Centre provides a wide range of business support services to its customers and takes care of complex, detailed and repetitive jobs that companies are unwilling or unable to do themselves. For example, they collate and pack 16,000 copies of an information bulletin for a local government department. Each information bulletin comprises up to eight separate items, and these are put into individual envelopes, ready for delivery. Their service extends well beyond filing envelopes.

The Orchardville team regularly undertake the design and print of materials, carry out mail merges and update and maintain databases for their clients. It’s little wonder that their customer base now includes a broad mix of small, medium and large organisations from across the voluntary, public and private sectors.

Orchardville’s manager, Ernie Spence, outlines the Business Centre’s marketing strategy: “We have experienced steady growth over the past ten years, mostly from satisfied customers referring our services to other clients. We currently advertise in the yellow pages and have designed an eye-catching promotional leaflet, but we are also looking at taking on a sales person to drive our business up to the next level. However, it is vital that our quality of service remains our major marketing tool.”

Primary purpose

Income has been building steadily since moving to new, more visible premises (Lagan Village Tower on the Ravenhill Road) some four years ago and during 2005, the Business Centre provided services to numerous public, private and voluntary sector customers. The centre is pleased that much of this was repeat business, a clear sign that customers are satisfied with the quality of the service they receive.

Income from contract customers rose by 41% year on year, with total revenues on target to reach £1/4 million, which will be a record year for the business.

The generated income now covers in excess of 90% of total running costs of the Business Centre, making it almost self sufficient, an excellent achievement for an organisation whose primary purpose is of support to provide quality training and employment opportunities.

As Alan Thomson explains, this purpose always has to take centre stage: “It is easy to forget that this group of marginalised people have, historically, been excluded from the labour market and have not been given the vocational opportunities that people without disability can access.

“In our organisation, people have a choice to undertake training and to develop their employment skills. Every trainee who comes here is allocated a package of support which includes vocational profiling, access to nationally accredited qualifications and close support in respect of all employment options. It is important to emphasise that choice and support towards economic independence is at the heart of our work. This is a fundamental tenet for us, because Orchardville was founded by parents and carers and to this day our executive committee comprises a combination of parents, carers and professional supporters of the organisation.”

Challenges

Business skills: the Orchardville management team believe that developing business skills poses their greatest challenge as, given their previous experience in the voluntary sector, they have had to work hard at developing their business acumen and abilities

Funding: existing funders remain very supportive and have been impressed at how the Business Centre is operating, especially as it now covers around 90% of its running costs. While the Society fully supports accountability for the public purse there are concerns that reporting requirements do not fully take into account business priorities within the wider social economy environment.

Managing a multi-site operation: with the development of a range of social economy initiatives, Orchardville is now operating from different sites across south and east Belfast. This has raised a number of management and communication issues which are being addressed.

Future plans

For Alan Thomson, the keyword for the future is sustainability: “Our target for the Business Centre is to make it fully self sustaining in terms of earned income. We never imagined this would be possible when we first started out, but now we are very close to achieving it and it would be a remarkable achievement for us to meet all our running costs through our trading income.”

And maybe Orchardville won’t stop there, for Alan is very aware that funding for the Society’s core activities is not guaranteed, even though funders are very happy with performance to date. He explains: “With reductions in European funding and changes through the review of public administration our future funding is somewhat insecure. We therefore want to see our social economy activity not just being self-sufficient, but also contributing to the core costs of Orchardville itself.”

Lessons learned

It is imperative that in the future, business plans are in place at the beginning of each project, rather than two or three years down the line. In some respects Orchardville Business Centre ‘fell into’ social economy activity by seeking more imaginative ways to meet the needs of trainees and students. That it has ultimately succeeded is to be commended, but having a clear plan in place from the outset would have made for a smoother path.

The way forward

The Business Centre has developed a successful business recipe based on delivering a specialised service, that is competitively priced and that carries a hallmark of quality. Its future success depends on maintaining this level of service and in carrying it through to new markets.

In this respect, it is important that all potential channels to market are fully explored, assessed and developed. This includes auditing current marketing practices and business development roles, with a view to making new resources and personnel available where necessary.