We’re delighted to have won an award this week at the National Social Value Conference Wales. Bron Afon won the Voluntary and Third Sector Leadership Award at the first-ever Social Value for Future Generations Awards 2021.
The Awards celebrate innovation, leadership, and best practice of social value in Wales, and also link with the Well-being and Future Generations Act. We won our category for taking the initiative to apply our sustainability gateway tool, introduced in 2020, to our decision-making for our ‘Pitch for Pound’ funding scheme, which invites community projects to apply to Bron Afon for a contribution towards project delivery.
The Gateway has provided a practical step to enable our Community Development team to assess each of the applications to the funding scheme “Pitch for Pound” through the lens of Wales’ well-being goals and sustainability, focusing on the social value that each application offers. Each proposed community project is assessed against three sets of criteria: Assessment on the sustainable development ways of working; Assessment on support to well-being goals; and Assessment on the negative impact on the well-being goals.
Bron Afon has made a commitment as an organization to be part of a sustainable Wales and we’re aiming to include sustainability, social values, and well-being goals into all of our business considerations and operations.
The judges said that this was an excellent scheme and was impressed with how Bron Afon Community Housing has embedded the tool to support their communities and deliver the goals of the Act successfully.
Dusi Thomas our sustainability & environmental manager explains how changing our approach means we can make sure that sustainability and social value are the foundations of everything we do:
“In the past, money from our community funding scheme was allocated on a first come first serve basis, focusing mainly on immediate, physical outcomes put forward by applicants. We could see the benefits in the communities receiving the funding, but we couldn’t clearly show how our community investment actually linked to Wales’ well-being goals, and which social values we consciously wanted to focus on or measure.
“This new approach has given us as a practical and effective step in making sustainability and social value part of business-as-usual. It helps our colleagues, customers, and communities to understand our ambition and how important these principles are to us as an organization.”
Read more here.