This last week I was considering making an approach to a government department given they have been advertising the availability of funding. By way of preparation I asked one of our senior staff what progress he had made a number of months ago when he invited the government minister responsible for the department to visit us. He told me he had received a letter suggesting we try a different government department given it was more relevant to PASS's work.
This last week I was also writing a funding application where one question asked 'what demand and need is there for the organisation's objectives?' and I wrote the following:
"Hertfordshire PASS’s
key objective or aim is to enable disabled people to be more independent. We
use employment (through our WorkABILITY programme), and ‘being an employer of care staff’ (through our EmployerABILITY programme) as the means by which
this is achieved. The demand for WorkABILITY grows out of the
exceptionally high levels of unemployment amongst disabled people (50%)
compared with the non-disabled population (20%), linked also to recent Welfare
and Benefit reforms where there is increasing pressure on disabled people to
secure employment. As a result disabled people need our services all the more.
The demand for PASS’s
‘being an employer of care staff’ work, we call EmployerABILITY, grows out of many disabled people
wanting to remain in their own homes rather than being taken into Local
Authority or private care. Given the cuts in public spending there is extra pressure on
disabled people to ‘go it alone’, but without this being adequately resourced (
- as highlighted by a recent National Audit Office report ‘Oversight of user
choice and provider competition in care markets’ published 15 September 2011).
One of the benefits of
operating the EmployerABILITY programme, which prepares disabled people to be better employers of
their care staff, is that it makes them significantly more employable, which
links directly to PASS’s WorkABILITY programme. Not only is such a (unique?)
‘one stop shop’ creating a demand in local disabled people, it is also
generating interest from a political point of view both locally and nationally.
There is also demand
for our apprenticeship programme because PASS is the only organisation in the
UK providing a specialist service for young disabled people, delivered by young
disabled people – so the National Apprenticeship Service inform us.
Lastly we feel there
is demand for what we do because it is user-driven. Where users decide on what
is to be provided, and how, and deliver it, it will, by definition meet the
needs of their peers. (PASS has published 5 books / papers on its user-driven work
– available on request.)"
I had thought to write a bit more about the demand and need for our work in this funding application, but I was worried the charity we were applying for funds to, might lose sight of what PASS does, a bit like the government department that encouraged us to go elsewhere.
We believe it is one of PASS's strengths that to enable disabled people to become more independent we use programmes in employment, and 'being an employer of care staff', not just separately, but together sometimes. In addition we try very hard to be user-driven. Unfortunately such an integrated approach may well be a weakness in terms of raising the profile of our work with the relevant (and quite separate) government departments, at local and national levels. For example
- employment is the responsibility of the Department of Work and Pensions, and in relation to apprenticeships the responsility of the Department of Further Education, Lifelong Learning and Skills,
- 'being an employer of care staff' is the responsibility of Social Services (now called Health and Social Care), and
- PASS's user-driven work, the responsibility of the Department for Disability Issues.
So perhaps it is no surprise one of the above departments referred us on to one of the others when we wrote to the Minister responsible, but it is nevertheless disappointing.
I don't think we'll change the way we work though. As Ernest Becker ( - the Pulitzer Prize winner) wrote we live "in an era of hyperspecialization (where) we have lost the expectation of.....delight.....(where) thought (and insights) span several fields of knowledge".
We hope heads of government departments might come and share in our delight. We'll see.
