We know that disability hate crime is a serious issue which affects a considerable number of disabled people and those around them each year. The seriousness and extent of the issues – plus its causes and effects – have been captured in a series of reports and publications, particularly over the last 3 years, most recently reflected in the EHRC’s Inquiry into disability hate crime and the debate in Westminster Hall in December 2011.

Alongside the role of various public agencies, the role of Disabled People’s User-Led Organisations in addressing all aspects of disability hate crime has been well described. Indeed, there are some good examples of how DPULOs have played a significant role in addressing disability hate crime.

However, this role and the difference it has made hasn’t necessarily been well understood or publicised.

A collection of case studies

To address this, the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is bringing together a collection of case studies of up to 10 DPULOs that have made a difference in addressing disability hate crime.

The collection will cover:

• What a DPULO has done to address disability hate crime in their local area
• How they went about doing this
• What the results were
• What general lessons we can learn from DPULOs being involved in addressing disability hate crime.

Dissemination

The collection of case studies would be widely disseminated through the DPULO network associated with the Strengthening DPULOs Programme and all its communications channels, including the ODI website, monthly email and social media.

We would also aim to disseminate this report to each police force in the country, as well as each local authority.

The collection would also inform the work ODI is doing on disability hate crime at present, particularly in informing the Disability Strategy.

How you can get involved

It is vitally important that this work is done by DPULOs.

The collection of case studies will therefore be coordinated and written by a DPULO. Support will also go directly to the DPULOs whose work will be a case study in order to support their effective contribution.

The role of the coordinating DPULO will be to:

• Scope and agree potential DPULO case studies
• Produce a case study template
• Liaise with each chosen DPULO in writing their case study
• Contribute to writing an introduction and conclusion for the collection
• Draft the final collection.

We anticipate this work will take approximately 8-10 days in total.

Expressions of Interest

We would like DPULOs to submit a brief (no more than 2 A4 pages) Expression of Interest to coordinate this collection of work.

Your Expression of Interest should cover:

• The DPULO’s knowledge, understanding and expertise regarding disability hate crime
• The DPULO’s knowledge and understanding of how DPULOs can contribute to addressing disability hate crime
• Demonstrable evidence of the DPULO’s networks and contacts with other DPULOs
• The DPULO’s experience in project management
• The DPULO’s experience in delivering high quality written materials in relatively short timescales
• The DPULO’s capacity to demonstrate the ability to deliver this work within the next 2-3 months
• Your proposed daily rate for this work.

This Expression of Interest will be considered and marked by the Strengthening DPULOs Programme team, and the coordinating DPULO will be chosen on the basis of the information provided. The work will be resourced through a grant to the coordinating DPULO.

Please submit your Expression of Interest to Richard.Watts1@dwp.gsi.gov.uk by 5pm on Friday 2 March 2012.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Rich above. Similarly, if you know someone who may be interested, please pass this information on to them.

Strengthening DPULOs Programme, February 2012

The DPULO (Disabled People’s User Led Organisations) chat is back on Twitter tonight, it is hosted in association with the Strengthening DPULOs Programme (on which you can find more here and on Facebook). An overview of the programme is here.

The #dpulo Twitter discussion will be every Tuesday night from 8-9pm, and is an opportunity for people who work or are interested in Disabled People’s User-Led Organisations to chat with each other on various topics of interest. The #dpulo Twitter discussion is resuming tonight (Tuesday 21 February) at 8pm.

The purpose of the #dpulo Twitter discussions are to:

• Enable people associated with DPULOs to share the issues they’re facing and solutions they or others have come across
• Enable people to share ideas / information / publications / resources they’ve come across with each other
• Provide a level of peer support and networking for people who work in disabled people’s user-led organisations.

The topic for this session is:

How do we ensure the wider engagement of people from other equality strands – such as BME, LGBT or gender – in DPULOs?

Please feel free to get involved in the discussion and share your views and perspectives. The hashtag for the discussion is #dpulo. Please do also share details of the discussion with anyone you think may be interested in it. I’ll write up the discussion in a blogpost afterwards, and share with everyone who took part and is interested in this topic.

I am emailing to share information with you about the Strengthening Disabled People’s User-Led Organisations (DPULOs) Programme, and to let you know how you can stay in touch with our work.

The Programme was launched by the Minister for Disabled People, Maria Miller MP, last year. The aim of the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is to provide a range of practical and financial support to DPULOs to become stronger and more sustainable.

You can read an overview of the Strengthening DPULOs Programme here.

Since launch, the Programme has provided financial support to a DPULO every week of the programme through the Facilitation Fund – over 25 organisations in less than 6 months. It has also provided a wide range of non-financial support to DPULOs, including evidence about the effectiveness of DPULOs and learning from DPULOs across the country.

You can read about the difference the Strengthening DPULOs Programme has made so far here.

Find out more about the Programme and keeping in touch

We will be starting a regular, monthly email to all DPULOs. This will help share learning and evidence from the programme, and share other useful sources of information. It will also create a networking opportunity for DPULOs and other interested stakeholders.

This regular email will start at the end of this month, and we’ll aim not to inundate you with information may receive from other sources.

To find out more about the Strengthening DPULOs Programme, you can visit our website.

You can also keep in touch with the programme through our regularly updated Facebook page. This includes information that may be useful to DPULOs, as well as information about the programme too. If you are on Facebook, you can find us there.

If you are on Twitter, you can share information and find out more about DPULOs using the hashtag #dpulo.

As always, we’d be grateful if you can spread the word and publicise this news throughout your networks / newsletters / websites etc.

Contact us

For information, biographies, contact details and details of the areas covered by each of the 12 DPULO Ambassadors covers, please visit the Ambassadors page.

If you have any questions about the Facilitation Fund or any part Strengthening DPULOs Programme, please contact odi.businessperformance@dwp.gsi.gov.uk.

Share this information

Please feel free to forward this information on to any DPULOs, networks or stakeholders you think might find it interesting. If you didn’t receive the original email, please share your contact details with us so you can receive our monthly emails.

As an Ambassador for the Office for Disability Issues Strengthening DPULOs programme, one of the best parts of the job is getting out and actually seeing other groups, what stage of development they are at and meeting the faces behind the organisation.

This week, thanks to the lack of snow, I was able to visit two such groups.

The first of these was the Personalisation Support Group in Doncaster.

The PSG is a group of people with mental health issues that supported each other when there was a refusal to give anyone with a mental health condition in a particular area a Direct Payment. The group asked other disability groups for support, but didn’t receive any and eventually successfully challenged this using a judicial review.

The group is supported on a voluntary basis by Kelly Hicks (Independent Social Worker), who has recently been named Social Worker of the Year.

The group has recently applied for and were successful in getting a grant from the Strengthening DPULOs Facilitation Fund grant for a project called Support Buddies, This funding is for a variety of training courses, marketing and promotional materials.

Meeting the group was a fantastic experience as I could actually see the benefits of the grant we had made. The group meets weekly in a church hall and are lively, committed to the project and to each other.

They support each other not just in an emotional way, but also in practical ways: in one fantastic example a member had recently moved house and around 10 members had assisted her, from changing light bulbs, decorating and moving furniture.

The group have loads of ideas and want to have premises, new services and one member is making a film of the work they are doing. They are keen to work with other organisations and have just started joint meetings with Active Independence, who have also received funding from the Facilitation Fund and are also a relatively new group.

It really was an excellent visit and the group had lots of questions for me as to how they can develop, but also wanted to express their thanks to the Strengthening DPULO programme for their support.

My second visit was to Lincolnshire Independent Living (LIL).

LIL is a small user led organisation formed in 2011, that is aiming to cover the whole of Lincolnshire, covering both large urban areas and isolated rural communities. Currently, they have no office base, around 90 members and have two part time staff .

They have small funding for two projects:

• To develop a peer-to-peer support user network (aiming to support disabled people and carers)
• A Quality checking service, looking at organisations from a disability perspective.

They have an idea that they want to develop a “virtual CIL” which may rely on workers using laptops and mobile phones, rather than having an office base, due to the size of the geographical area. This is an interesting idea, but they need to develop a clear idea of what services they want to run. They have ideas around information, Direct Payments, etc and I tried to give them some ideas of how other CILs have developed.

Much more than this, though, is the work they do.

Rather than me try to describe it, they’ve kindly produced a brief document which talks about what they do.

Importantly, anyone who works in a Disabled People’s User-Led Organisation could see just how useful the work of Community Catalysts could be to them. As such, it’s well worth finding more out about what they do and get in touch!

There were some key points I wanted to get across during the webinar:

• We have to acknowledge and understand the fact that it’s a tough environment at the moment. Inclusion London’s report about DPULOs in London and Alex’s post about DPULOs being “an endangered species” raise very important points
• But, several current public service systems – be it in social care, health, hate crime, employment – aren’t working as well as they could do. DPULOs to date have not been big parts of those systems, but some tremendous work by DPULOs across the country suggests they can be a part of those systems, and in making those public service systems better
• Commissioners themselves are struggling to find answers. DPULOs can be part of those answers, and can work constructively with commissioners to identify and achieve the possibilities inherent in the difficult environment both parties are facing
• There is a long history of disabled people’s organisations – we need to build on this wider history and its successes, not just those within the relatively narrow confines of social care in the last 5 years.

If you’d like to hear the full webinar, please get in touch with Laura at In Control (perhaps via Twitter – @incontrolorg).

Don’t forget: if you work within a DPULO or know one, let them know about the Strengthening DPULOs Programme – info on the ODI website and on Facebook. We’re also on Twitter via #dpulo.

Webinar – Strengthening disabled people’s user-led organisations

Join us for a free webinar on 16 February 2012 at 10am to 10.45am

Space for this online event is limited and is available for Stay Connected members on a first-come-first served basis. However access is available as part of a free trial of the network.

Disabled people’s user-led organisations (DPULOs) can and do play a unique role in both representing the voice of disabled people and in delivering public services, particularly in social care.

In this session, Rich Watts will provide an overview of the work that DPULOs do and will share evidence and best practice from DPULOs across the country and the difference they’re making. He will also share information about the Office for Disability Issues’ Strengthening DPULOs programme that promotes the sustainability of DPULOs.

The main draws will clearly be (a) being able to talk with other people who are interested in DPULOs and make contacts with them; and (b) finding out more about the Office for Disability Issues’ DPULOs Programme (and through which there’s some ££s available).

The downside, though, will be that you’ll have to listen to me for a bit. Every cloud…

Sign up!

Community development offers support for independent voluntary local community groups, organisations and networks, producing wider and more effective community activity. As a “bottom-up” approach, it ensures work is driven and owned by residents, and complements “top-down” engagement by public agencies such as local authorities and (what were) PCTs. Qualitative impacts can be both directly in individuals involved in community development, and indirectly through service changes and resulting improvements.

As such, community development is of particular interest to me in its similarities with the role that disabled people’s user-led organisations play in involving and representing disabled people in coproducing services in social care and health. Where “residents” drive community development, so “service users and/or disabled people” drive coproduction.

Community development is a proxy for the work of DPULOs.

In the case of HELP, the role of community development was tested in a health setting in 3 particular geographical areas. The qualitative results were impressive:

• New developments – such as increased volunteering, wider social networks, better cooperation between community groups, and greater trust between residents and public agencies – were observed.
• Residents who were active in community development benefitted the most, but all residents benefitted from the improvements they secured, including in services and ameneties
• The increased dialogue and collaboration with communities gave public agencies better intelligence for commissioning and engendered more trust and cooperation from service users.

From a quantitative point of view, there were further substantial results:

• Cardiovascular disease, depression and obesity were three widespread conditions which the research showed to be alleviated by general community activity: it was cautiously estimated the range of activity generated by a two-year community development pilot project prevents 5% a year of the known events in respect of this limited selection of the relevant health conditions.
• (Similar projects suggest community development can also contribute to improvements in areas such as emergency ambulance calls, A&E attendance, emergency hospital admissions / readmissions and the prevention of falls.)
• In an illustrative neighbourhood of 5,000 people, there would be a saving for the health service of £558,714 over three years on depression, obesity, CVD and a small number of the other health factors. This is a saving of £3.80 for every £1 invested in a £145,000 community development programme over the same period.
• If the community development method was applied simultaneously in 3 neighbourhoods, there would be a likely saving for the local health service of £1,676,142 from an investment of £261,900, a return of £6.40 for every £1 invested.
• Further savings produced by associated reductions in crime and anti-social behaviour from the same activities produces further savings, which aren’t included in the above.

The final key point to draw out is that community development in this form is not an additional layer or thing that public agencies must do: it is instead described as a “stimulant” that brings alive the interface between residents (users) and public agencies.

These are important qualitative and quantitative results that demonstrate the value added by community development approaches and, by extension, coproduction with organisations such as DPULOs.

You can find out more about the Health Empowerment Leverage Project here.

(Inevitably, my summary above misses out several key discussions / issues / thoughts etc. Thus, below is the full document from which I’ve drawn out the above.)

Indeed, I hoped that some DPULOs would be involved in the delivery of the Social Work Practice pilots.

And, indeed, they are. The document embedded at the bottom of this post is a summary I’ve created of all of the Social Work Practice pilots, and includes two in particular – Birmingham and North East Lincolnshire – that are explicitly working with DPULOs.

The good news doesn’t end there. SCIE has recently announced a further 10 Social Work “Pioneer” projects – essentially the same thing as Social Work Practices, but just starting a bit later.

The full press release is here. What’s particularly exciting about this is that a further two sites – another in Birmingham and one in York – are directly involving DPULOs.

This is fantastic, and I’ll share relevant learning and information as the Social Work Practices and Pioneers move forwards.

What this means is that – in my experience anyway – council decision makers care about two things, and often two things only: maintaining a level of service so that outcomes do not seriously worsen, and saving money. Supporting staff ownership comes nowhere near these priorities on the agenda, if it features at all. If a staff-owned provider can deliver on both, then great, but a mutual is very unlikely to be given the kind of preferential treatment it needs and deserves to get off the ground if there’s an established voluntary or private sector provider waiting in the wings.

Fortunately, there is a prescription for this:

The answer is probably something that sounds familiar, but only because we haven’t cracked it yet. In her excellent post on this blog last week, Hannah Jameson from the IPA hit the nail on the head: when she said that knowledge networks are notoriously weak in the public sector, but emphasized how essential they are for new public service organisations to have a real impact.

Hannah’s post is indeed excellent, and her point is the right one.  This is nicely demonstrated by her example:

A recent survey of public sector innovation by NESTA showed that 70 per cent of those questioned believed that they had developed a new to sector innovation. Analysis of the examples given showed this was far from the case, but weak networks meant that people were working in isolation, unaware of what others were doing.

I hope the work of organisations like OPM and the Transition Institute (whose blog Phil and Hannah’s articles appeared on) can help with the prescription.

(It would be remiss of me not to mention the work I’m doing regarding Disabled People’s User-Led Organisations. These are another form of organisation that can contribute to the delivery of public services, as well as represent the voices of disabled people in their local communities. Part of the Strengthening DPULOs Programme is essentially the creation of a knowledge network. You can find out more on the DWP website and the programme’s Facebook page.)