Is it time for Communities to Consider Tendering for Public Contracts?

Ok, so that headline may appear a little unexpected for some, and daunting for others but it’s a serious question; with funding opportunities shrinking, is it time that community groups look at different income streams for generating income… and in doing so, picking up public sector contracts?

To be honest, from the perspective of the grass roots community organisation, it’s not as unachievable nor as difficult as it as appears at first glance, and I can say this from my personal experience. Sometimes we just need that ‘push’, understanding or confidence to do so. Personally, I was ‘pushed’ and if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this today; eight years ago, having been a community practitioner for over twelve years at the time, I found myself unexpectedly redundant and out of work. While waiting for the ‘right’ job to come along, I set myself up as a self employed consultant and started looking at how I could apply my knowledge and experience to generate an income. I asked myself a couple of key questions:-

1) What do I enjoy doing/talking about?

2) What do other people ask me for help with?

3) What do I know more about a subject than most people?

4) Who/what can I access that others cannot?

My community work was (and still very much is) my life and my passion. Therefore, all my answers to these questions centred around community engagement.

Then I thought “who needs to engage with communities?”, “who hasn’t got the capacity to do so themselves?”, and “who needs an independent person to do so?”, and went about promoting my experience and availability to whoever would fit into the response to these questions (social landlords, governmental departments, large charities etc). Within weeks, I’d created my own course on the subject of community engagement and was delivering it to housing associations and local authorities, within six months I was conducting consultation events for governmental departments, and within a year I was conducting consultation workshops for a large NGO… and most importantly… I was getting paid!

I later applied the exact same skill set to different contexts and expanded my ‘offer’ as a trainer, as a facilitator, as a researcher, and as a bid writer until I eventually found that ‘right’ job where I still practice that combination of skills as the Business Growth Consultant at Cwmpas. I have now been employed at Cwmpas for over 6 years where my role largely involves overseeing funding/tendering bids, providing engagement advice and guidance, and facilitating workshops.

I would never have taken that initial step without that ‘push’ of being made unexpectedly redundant but in retrospect, I was using exactly the same skills that I had developed as a community development practitioner… and I (along with many more of my colleagues), could have been offering these services (and other skills that they had) to generate additional income (i.e. “clean money”), for the charity we worked for. Indeed, I recently met up with one of those colleagues still at that charity and explained this series of events. I asked them those same questions that I asked myself and subsequently that person has since delivered a (paid) training course and has been added as a consultant by a local business support team.

So, what skills do you have within your community groups? I like to use the Head, Hand, Heart model to help draw this out:-

· The Head — what knowledge/experience do you have?

· The Hand — what skills do you have?

· The Heart — what is your passion?

Once you find out what you can offer, you then need to source the opportunity to apply your offer. Think who would need it? Where can I find them? and, How can I approach them?

In Wales*, for contracts under £5,000, clients can make a direct approach to an individual company to conduct a piece of work. If the piece of work is between £5,000 and £25,000, the client is required to source quotes from 3 different interested parties. Neither of these opportunities need to be publicly advertised so its important that you make these potential clients aware of your existence and your “offer”. If the contract is over the value of £25,000, then it needs to be present for open competition on a platform such as Sell2Wales.

*NOTE! Things are currently changing and this information may already be out of date!

I’m sharing this screenshot I took earlier today of recent Sell2Wales opportunities that could potentially include the expertise of community groups, just to prove that such opportunities do exist:-

So what’s holding you back? Inevitably, ability and capacity will always come into question but there’s also nothing stopping you from creating a partnership! When I conducted the research for the NGO mentioned earlier, I partnered with an experienced researcher who devised the process, analysed and presented the data while I conducted the interviews and delivered the workshops — he did the things he was good at and enjoyed while I did the things that I was good at and enjoyed; between us we met the requirements of the client.

If its confidence that is holding you back then perhaps creating a partnership (and being a sub-partner), could be a nice introduction to this way of income generation.

Essentially, my message to community groups is that you may have untapped skills and knowledge that bigger organisations would be willing to pay for. This extra money could be an additional income stream that could make a difference and is therefore worth considering.

Until next time!