Abstract
Compassionate Inverclyde, a multi-award winning social movement, was established in 2017 in a mixed urban / coastal area with a population of 80,000 and high levels of poverty, disability and trauma. Our previous reports describe the design principles, the many benefits for citizens, communities and organisations, and the contribution to realising local and national outcomes. As we face unprecedented economic and workforce challenges, investment in proactive preventative support struggles to compete with demands for funding of reactive care. The need to demonstrate impact from investment in prevention and community led solutions is now more pressing. Therefore, we aimed to understand the social value realised through Compassionate Inverclyde and to identify the organisational enablers of realising value from investment in this citizen and community led approach.
This mixed methods study retrospectively analysed activity and benefits data that had been prospectively recorded by the programme lead and support officer between 2017 and 2022 for a subset of Compassionate Inverclyde initiatives: No One Dies Alone; Back Home Boxes; Back Home Visitors; Lockdown Prescription deliveries; New Mums; Companions; Friendship Hub, and Singing Group. We estimated costs avoided for statutory partners by compassionate citizen companions releasing staff time to care for other patients/ clients. We reviewed narrative feedback from beneficiaries and applied Social Return on Investment methods to assign a monetary value to intangible benefits such as reduced loneliness and improved relationships. We applied data from a published bank of monetary values for two outcomes commonly reported by people supported by Compassionate Inverclyde: feeling of belonging to a neighbourhood, and relief from depression/anxiety. One year monetary values were filtered for estimated degree of attribution, deadweight and attrition.
Compassionate Inverclyde was fully operation for only five years in the period from inception to end of 2022 as some initiatives were paused or were time-limited during the pandemic. Over five years, estimated social value exceeds £1,265,173. With programme infrastructure costs of around £82,000 per year, we estimated a 3:1 social return on investment for people and communities through creating wellbeing, resilience and social capital and through costs avoided for citizens and for statutory services.
The study found a high degree of fidelity to the five principles of the Collective Impact framework where success requires collective actions and a considered balance between pre-determined and carefully governed actions, and grass root driven and emergent activities. The ‘backbone’ capacity to ensure smooth running of the complex and dynamic programme functioned as a systems convenor, opening up spaces for different conversations across traditional boundaries and silos to unleash unrealised potential. While often operating as a self-organizing social movement, the programme fulfils all six core organisational functions of networks.
This study offers practical insights for community and voluntary organisations engaged in promoting caring neighbourhoods / compassionate communities and community led support. While rigorous economic evaluation may be beyond their reach of these organisations, pragmatic use of social value methods combined with agreed estimates of costs avoided can build a compelling case for investment in community capacity building and prevention for population health.