• How do they manage their facilities in terms of health and safety, storage, and staffing (paid and voluntary)?
• What challenges they have encountered and how they have overcome them?
• How do they ensure the facilities are well used and create the best possible value to the communities they serve?

Learning Outcomes

We found out a lot about how the different organisations manage their facilities, about different ways of funding the services about the day to day processes and what staff and volunteers do to make the services work. We learnt the importance of enthusiastic and engaged volunteers – and to create this good relationship the importance of trust, good training and using volunteer input to shape the services. We very particularly wanted to know about storage and it was great to see that in person, to take lots of photographs and get specific ideas about how the tools should be stored for ease of accessibility. We got ideas about how to make the space adaptable, and were please to see that the size of the space would work for what we wanted to achieve.

"A significant takeaway from all of the visits was how useful it was to see the facilities in person and to talk to volunteers and staff face to face. This gave us a real insight into how things were run, the enthusiasm of everyone for the services offered and how great our proposals could be! It made the project seem much more real and much more achievable."