The Community Outreach Family Support Service is a £7.9 million flagship programme that provides practical support, guidance, counselling and workshops to members of the community. The COFSS project is an outreach programme that provides a multi-agency, multi-discipline approach to deliver integrated services to the hardest to reach members of the Aston community to address their health, education, social and economic welfare needs.

Project Summaries

The COFSS programme is housed within the area of Aston, which is one of the most deprived areas of Birmingham. COFSS seeks to address the reason why there is a low take up of mainstream services and seeks to address those issues through the gaining and understanding of individuals needs; and directly responding to those needs. The multi-agency, multi-discipline approach will allow for financial, emotional, health and well-being to be addressed simultaneously; and for social circumstances to be stabilised/ improved, and robustly support COFSS users to access education and employment for an economical viable outcome.

The commissioning process, where possible, has departed from traditional methods to ensure that the contractor-provider relationship resulted in a collaboration of shared objectives leading to total buy-in to the programme. The COFSS Model aims to achieve its objectives through a ‘true’ partnership arrangement with both near and far partners, both those obligated and non-obligated; this is managed through a robust framework.

The COFSS Model is designed to take services out to members in the community, accessed through the use of health centres and commercial and community settings. All delivery sites are designed to ensure that services delivered are discreet. The COFSS Programme addresses its service users by delivering alongside mainstream activities. This approach maximises opportunities, works towards mainstreaming and enhances current service provision. The COFSS programme has been designed to be flexible and in doing so allows for a response to the change in service provision. All providers in the programme are aware of this and have embraced the COFSS Model. It is recognised that the only way to seek and respond to service users is to discover their needs and what is ‘real’ to them; as anecdotal evidence suggests, there is a mismatch between the statutory sectors priorities and how the community view priorities. This differential is one of the issues that COFSS seeks to address.

COFSS seeks to capture the views of the local community and engage them on the vision and direction that the model portrays. It aims to do this in a meaningful way through COFSS established forums for both large and small, constituted and non-constituted organisations. To manage this successfully, a Community Links Manager position exists within the appointed management team to focus solely on the exchange of views to ensure effective communication and evidence those views leading to improve service provision. The COFSS programme has been designed to undergo constant review and has commissioned an Evaluation Team to monitor its effectiveness throughout the lifetime of the programme. The programme commenced the development phase utilising anecdotal evidence and available data; the Evaluation Team has provided the baseline data with which to monitor the programme’s effectiveness. Along with the robust monitoring, provided by the bespoke database, changes to the programme can be made to respond to emerging need. The COFSS programme is complex and aims not just to deliver quality services to those marginal and excluded groups but to the whole community. It seeks to understand current behaviour with regards to the use of mainstream services. The programme author is under no illusion of the challenges that are involved in transforming targeted areas of regeneration, therefore partnership working with all agencies involved is crucial to the success of the programme, and ultimately will determine whether the high level outcomes are achieved.

The subsequent plan is for service users to engage in to the programme, and where possible, work towards employment. COFSS therefore sets out to provide further intensive, far reaching support, through employment and/or educational programmes.