Fresh Ideas Case Studies

Community Campus – £41,500

Community Campus provides accommodation, support and training to young people and to people with drug and alcohol problems in Teesside. Community Campus already owns and manages around 50 properties in the area. The award helped Community Campus establish a social lettings agency providing services to private landlords helping them to manage their properties. This generates additional income and makes more accommodation available to the people it aims to support.

Vision Sense – £39,000

Vision Sense is a user-led organisation for disabled people. It is currently using Fresh Ideas investment to develop and market a commercially viable and sustainable on-line training course, supplemented by on-site mentoring by disabled people. The training is focused on safeguarding and prevention of hate crime and interpersonal violence as it affects disabled people. The organisation has used its Fresh Idea’s investment for market testing, developing new financial models, testing course content, commissioning legal documents, developing an accessible website and booking system and commissioning new branding. Outcomes for this work will include a much wider audience for the training and an income stream for the organisation.

Bell View – £45,388

An innovative charity providing practical care and support to older people in rural Northumberland. Bell View used the funding to carry out a feasibility study and devise a business plan to develop a homecare service.

Bell View subsequently established a second trading arm and employed a very experienced manager to take forward the service.

Props North East – £46,011

This award was to support the marketing of a specialist-training package that is very highly regarded with the recovery community. Props launched a trading arm – Positive Practice Partnership Ltd (PPP) – to deliver the training package. PPP has already run two training courses in York and Stockton and is now arranging its third course in North Wales. Funds are now being used to market the training programme throughout the UK and to promote PPP in general in order to establish it as the preferred provider of services for recovery programmes.

Tyneside Mind – £25,760

It received a grant to research the feasibility of developing a therapy centre and to investigate whether some services should be delivered under a trading arm.