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Novas Scarman Group relaunches as People Can

Governance | Niki May Young | 17 Oct 2011

Novas Scarman Group, a social improvement organisation working to support individuals with issues including homelessness, domestic abuse and offending, relaunches as People Can today, following a £3m funding cut across its services.

With Maff Potts leading the charge as chief executive, the relaunch sees the organisation become a charity with a focus on service user involvement, a move which Potts believes will ensure the future of the organisation in the face of the £3m local authority cuts faced across its service portfolio.

“We all know that in the current climate money is tight, but the problems affecting many of the people we work with are only getting worse. We’re rising to this challenge, thinking differently and using people’s talent to turn lives around,” said Potts in a statement.

Speaking with civilsociety.co.uk he explained that the strategy is necessary because “commissioning is really murdering charities”. The organisation is currently applying for around 11 contracts with local authorities, but Potts says delays in actioning successful contract applications, something he refers to as a "strange state of paralysis within local authorities", is creating great difficulty for charities on top of other financial constraints.

The new charity's strategy works to ease some of this pressure: “We’ve got to do more for less,” he said, “But by putting our faith in people we work with we can quadruple our workforce.

“We would rather do that than knock on the town hall door and say ‘please give us more money’,” he added.

Potts is the former director of homelessness at the Salvation Army and leader of the government’s Places of Change programme which worked to improve homeless centres in England. He was brought in by the (then) Novas Scarman Group in October 2010 after a realisation that “something had to change”. His appointment followed that of an entirely new board and chairman at the organisation.

Potts’ strategy puts the new charity’s service users at the forefront of its services, and works to identify and utilise the strengths of people in crisis to empower them to change their lives. This ‘can do’ attitude, says Potts, is what underpins the work of the charity, which originated 30 years ago in response to the Brixton riots.

He identified this as the unique selling point for the charity. “If you’re going to survive in this current climate you’ve got to be really clear about what you do,” he said, “And we found this nugget, which runs throughout our services, and that’s to put power in the hands of the people we work with.” The rebrand, he says, will take service user involvement “up a notch” to create “full on empowerment”.

Services incorporated within the organisation include a domestic abuse helpline which is run almost entirely by former sufferers, and a drug hostel in Soho where 80 per cent of the staff are former users who have been through the system themselves.

Potts advised that due to the cuts he was under a "huge amount of pressure to go down the voluntary fundraising route", but he resisted, instead choosing to rely on funding from the organisation’s social enterprises. “Voluntary fundraising is not something I disagree with, I think that more people should give more, but it doesn’t follow the ethos of the charity,” he said. People Can will retain the social enterprises set up under the Novas Scarman Group, which include Liverpool’s “behemoth” CUC arts and entertainment venue.

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