On Tuesday evening, Create Trustee John Broadis and I were guests at the stunning Leathersellers’ Hall in the City of London for a wonderful evening celebrating the exceptional contribution that small charities make to our society.
We were invited as winners of the Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI) Small Charity Big Impact Award (with an income between £500,001 – £1.5 million), one of ten awards given to charities that “clearly showed how they measure their impact, use it to improve their services and share it to build trust”.
Our approach to designing and delivering creative arts projects has always been to listen and learn – listen to participants, community and funding partners about how we can add value and learn from every workshop, every project and every piece of feedback.
We’re delighted that our commitment to excellence is delivering great results: alongside this award and our Charity Award win last month, we recently finished evaluating the feedback from 2016/17, the results of which are summarised in our Impact Report. For the first time, 100% of our community partners rated their project “successful overall”.
As part of our prize from the FSI, we have been featured in a book delivered to 10 Downing Street and had this amazing film made about our partnership with Deutsche Bank. It focuses on one element of the connect:create programme that we have designed to help them achieve their corporate responsibility objectives: an animation project at Queensmill School with young people with autism.
FSI CEO Pauline Broomhead said:
“Create won their category as they clearly showed how they measure their impact, use it to improve their services and share it to build trust. We would like to congratulate Create on their award and their fantastic work.
“Small charities (those with an annual turnover under £1.5 million) make up over 97% of the charity sector, yet their amazing work and impact can often be drowned out.
“In the recent House of Lords Report on charities, they said charities are the eyes, ears and conscience of society, they mobilise, inspire, advocate and unite. Every sentiment of this is true and especially so of the thousands of small and local charities and community groups registered in the UK whose reach knows no boundaries. Through the Small Charity Big Impact Awards we salute the dedication, support and determination of these organisations.”
Winning this prestigious award, and the incredible feedback we’ve had from our participants, community and funding partners, demonstrates that our approach of listening and learning works. As one of our partners told us: “Create is the ONLY organisation that has ever asked us what WE want.”
Nicky Goulder, Founding Chief Executive
This article is from 2017.