Day Centres: The Funding Context

Photo credit: Mike Wade

Day centres, as part of their open and accessible nature, tend to be small, locally based organisations. Many were started by a handfull of concerned citizens in response to a perceived need, and have continued in a hand-to-mouth existence ever since. By no means do these grass-roots origins belittle such organisations - often their base in their local community will be their greatest strength - but it has meant that many day centres are hampered in providing people with the opportunities and means to change. There is no statutory funding stream that aims specifically at day centres, and many are highly reliant on charitable fundraising. Day centres are less likely than accommodation-based services to own their buildings or to be purpose-built and are also more likely to operate in premises that restrict their capacity to deliver services. In many cases, they also have more limited data collection procedures. In today’s funding climate, it has become increasingly important to demonstrate the impact of services to potential donors through outcomes monitoring – which means there is a danger that day centres could start to lose out on financial support. (For further details on day centres service provision and usage, see the Survey of Needs and Provision report.)

This website provides information and resources for day centres looking to develop their fundraising capacity, and to make fundraising less time consuming and more successful by providing some helpful tips and tools.

Sources of Funding

One of the principal factors that has made day centres the 'cinderella services' of the sector is the lack of a dedicated funding stream for homeless day services. This makes it extremely hard for many day centres - especially those that are small, independent organisations - to obtain the long-term sustainable funding which is necessary to fulfil their service provision potential. Furthermore, many day centres are small and often highly under-resourced organisations, meaning that implementing an overall sustainable funding strategy is difficult. This section looks at different sources of funding that day centres can look to in putting together a funding plan - remember that you shouldn't be over-reliant on any one source!

Click on the headings below for more information.

Grant Funding

Grant funding, most often from charitable trusts and foundations, often makes up a principal part of a day centre's income. It can be ideal for starting up new projects, capital funding for improvements and money to expand and develop your day centre's services. While grants are rarely sustainable sources of funding in themselves, generally being quite limited in scope and time, they will make up a part of your sustainable funding strategy for your day centre. In this section, we'll try to make fundraising from charitable trusts and foundations as easy as possible, and we'll give you tips to try and get you the longest-running, biggest grants. You can also check out our featured trust of the month!

Monitoring and Evaluation: Show them you're worth it!

Monitoring and evaluation are a crucial part of a sustainable funding strategy. Small organisations that can't demonstrate the value of their work will start to lose out on funding as funders increasingly want to see evidence as to the impact day centres are making in terms of outcomes. When applying for funding, it is important to show that the funder's money will be spent effectively and efficiently. The best way to do this is to implement monitoring and evaluation procedures so that you can track what you are achieving and how. This will also help services to stay on top of the times and to better meet the needs of their clientele.

Newsflash

Homeless Link held a highly successful research conference, 'Joining the Dots: connecting the evidence base for homelessness policy and practice' on 15 May in London. The conference touched on the need for smaller organisations to make sure that they have the best possible monitoring policies so that they have an evidence base for the work they are doing. Concern was also expressed that if they did not start to implement outcomes monitoring, these smaller organisations, which make up the backbone of the homelessness sector, would lose out on funding and on policy influence.

The pages in this section are intended as a resource for homelessness day centres to build effective monitoring and evaluation practices in order to improve their service delivery and fundraising capability. It explains why monitoring and evaluation are important and how to go about it, as well as providing extra resources and case studies.

• Getting Started
• Monitoring
• Special feature: Monitoring for LAA indicators
• Evaluation
• Further reading and resources

Further Information and Resources

This section signposts you to resources to tell you more about other things you really do need to know about funding and fundraising, but that we cannot cover in detail on these pages.

In particular, you can find:

• Resources providing general funding guidance, including downloadable guides to funding planning, research, strategy, applications and much, much more.
• Information about full cost recovery.
• More monitoring and evaluation resources, because we can't plug this enough!
• Training opportunities, including the John Laing Charitable Trust Training Bursary Scheme !
• Other bits of news that we thought would be of interest.

Click here for more.

Research and Publications

Visit these pages for links to the latest research relating to day centres.

This project is funded by the John Laing Charitable Trust.