In social enterprises and the not for profit space, questions surrounding ‘success’ can be complex. For example, some issues to consider include:
- How important is keeping to budget versus investing in programs you aim to support?
- How important is the satisfaction of the team delivering your services and any volunteers you have on board?
Within community groups delivering support peer programs, similar issues appear. For example, your committee may need to choose between short term budgetary management and longer-term investments needed in training and program development to retain key staff and volunteers.
Peer support organisations specifically need to consider what a successful peer support program means to them. Answers to the question of ‘peer support program purpose’ is critical and will influence almost all aspects of the peer program design.
In considering peer program success, team members need to think about:
- What is the purpose of running their peer support program?
- How will you know you are successful? Would this be signified by the number of people attending a group, the number of new group facilitators you have recruited, being on budget with your delivery costs, or perhaps all three? Are other factors more important?
- What about whether people living with disability enjoy attending their peer support group?
- Perhaps your organisation believes it is really important that members and people with disability drive the content and delivery of sessions?
- Is your program focussed on supporting hard to reach people and, in this case, perhaps accessibility and flexibility are considered essential factors in your success?
Obviously, each peer support program needs to consider their purpose at the starting point of this journey into gathering evidence. If you don’t know where it is you want to get to, how could you possibly know if you are close or far away?
In this learning package we are focussing on peer organisations. These are the enterprises that are delivering peer support programs within the Information, Linkages and Capacity Building (ILC) grant program delivered by the NDIA. It is assumed that all peer organisations have foundations built on a strong right based philosophy, as outlined above. Therefore, they have a clear focus on building the individual capacity of their members/participants.
Yet even within this narrowed framework, each peer support organisation must still decide the specific purpose(s) of their peer support program. They need to clearly decide what they believe success means for their unique program.
The fundamental questions peer organisations’ face are ‘where do we want our peer support program to be’ and ‘where are we now’? They determine this based on a vast range of considerations which may include their knowledge and expertise, team and member lived experiences, target audience and funding availability.
Remember, the whole point of thinking about where we want to be is so that we have a compass to guide the journey. This compass will involve gathering evidence to know more clearly ‘where we are at’ in relation to the things we think are important; the things we consider aspects of our ‘success’.
We will use this evidence to assist us in developing ways peer organisations may be able to understand whether or not they are on the ‘right track’ as we take our gathering evidence journey throughout this learning package.