Our Purpose

Our Purpose

To accelerate bold meaningful change, assisting BOP communities and the environment to flourish.

Get Smart Knows It’s On The Right Track In Tauranga

7 JULY 2014

 

If your mission is to make a difference to the lives of young people in Tauranga Moana, how do you know if you’re succeeding?

That’s the question Get Smart, a long-standing charitable trust, had to ask itself last year during an extensive evaluation of its services.

The faith-based agency has been running in Tauranga for over 23 years, providing free drug and alcohol counselling and a range of other support programmes to tackle substance abuse and addiction.

Get Smart’s Street Help van helps look after people who have had too much alcohol.

BayTrust has had a long association with Get Smart and offered to fund up to $5000 towards a professional evaluation as part of its commitment to provide ‘expertise and mentoring support’.

“At first we thought it was some kind of audit but basically it was all about capacity building,” says Get Smart manager Stuart Caldwell.

“It turned out to be hugely beneficial. The process involved looking at all the things we do and identifying those things that were giving us the outcomes we wanted, and either changing, or in one case dropping, the programmes that weren’t worthwhile for the amount of energy we were putting in.”

In depth analysis

Stuart and his Get Smart team met with evaluator Diane Beattie for half a day every month from August until January 2014 to go over everything with a fine tooth comb.

Among the changes made were scaling back work Get Smart does in local primary schools to two terms instead of four. “That has helped us concentrate on other things that were more beneficial in the first and fourth terms.”

And the information required on referral forms for Get Smart’s counselling services has also been changed to try and reduce the number of young people who fail to turn up to their appointments.

“Prior to the person coming in we now have a lot more information about them and that puts us in a better position to work with them. We’re big on building rapport right at the start and if we do that well, it makes the young people want to come back.”

Stuart says inefficiencies have now been reduced and systems tightened up or improved as a result of the evaluation process.

 

Valuable opportunity

“This was the first time a funder had actually taken the initiative and put money specifically into building our capacity which was fantastic.”

Stuart says having a professional evaluation document is now also making it easier to secure funding from elsewhere.

“Funding bodies always want to know they’re giving money to organisations that produce worthwhile outcomes. We now have a document which shows the quantitative outcomes that our services are producing.”