Sutton Vision supports over 500 blind and vision impaired adults a year within the London Borough of Sutton. Their service offer focuses on enabling people to live full and independent lives through the provision of information and advice to ensure people can access the benefits, financial help and services to which they are entitled; assistive technology support to increase digital inclusion; social activities, befriending and peer support to address social isolation; an Eye Clinic Liaison Officer to provide emotional support and a low vision clinic and resource hub to offer practical help with everyday living. Advocacy is an important part of their work, focusing on the needs and rights of blind and vision impaired people living and working in the Borough. In 2023/4 they delivered 530 key activities across 2,500 attendances, including 665 1:1 information, advice and technical support sessions.
Summary
The funding would be used to support core costs, enabling the organisation to ‘look up’ in order to plan for the future, specifically by:
Embedding an outcomes framework across all services. A Theory of Change and associated outcomes framework has been developed and implementing this across all services would add huge long-term value by providing evidence of the impact of services.
Releasing the Chief Executive to spend more time on strategic development, particularly partnerships. There is a desire to participate in wider initiatives in the sector like the organisation did when the Eye Care Support Pathway work was being developed. Partnerships are increasingly important, e.g. their focus on physical exercise was based partly on what people wanted and barriers, but also on local public health reports.
Increasing fundraising resources - Having invested in Donorfy (fundraising CRM system), the intention now is to better resource individual giving, events and corporates fundraising, which has already had some success.
Researching/planning future project development . The recent strategy development process was thorough and identified several potential growth areas, e.g. children’s services and employment support, and this funding would assist in service design ahead of making other funding bids.