At a time when the government is trying both to cut costs and to raise the profile of social enterprise, meeting Maria Donoghue-Mills is a reminder of how well these two agendas could go together.
Donoghue-Mills is the chief executive of social enterprise Novas Scarman, which began life as a body running hostels for homeless people.
Now, it's a very different organisation, as Donoghue-Mills explains: "We used to manage hostels for homeless people, but we discovered that our customers wanted access to culture and learning and a much broader response to their needs, so today we don't own or manage any hostels."
Today, 60% of the organisation's income comes from public sector contracts, providing support to disadvantaged people, including prisoners, people escaping violence and people with complex needs.
The rest of its earned income comes from two buildings in London and Liverpool, where it provides offices, meeting spaces, an art gallery, cafe and shop and a conference centre.
"That is a self-sustaining model, run as a business, but where we also reinforce issues of social justice and inclusion," says Donoghue-Mills. The organisation has 350 staff, with half coming either from Novas Scarman's own support projects or from disadvantaged groups.
Donoghue-Mills acknowledges that many people find the different activities of her organisation an unlikely combination, "but our activities are all very complementary". Enabling people to express difficult feelings through art can be very helpful, but it also enables the organisation itself to get those messages out to a broader range of people. "We can influence how people think more this way than through a dry research report," she says.
Social enterprise ambassadors
She is also an advocate for social enterprise as a cost-effective way of helping people. Herself one of 30 social enterprise ambassadors appointed by the government two years ago, she believes using social enterprises could help everyone. She points to the scheme her organisation runs in Bristol, providing support to offenders when they leave prison. "It has a 90% success rate. It's a really good investment for relatively low cost per person," she says.
Donoghue-Mills is keen to see greater investment in this kind of programme. At the moment, she points out, a mere 2% of the Ministry of Justice's budget is spent with the third sector. "I find that quite shocking," she says. She points to other projects in which Novas Scarman is involved, including a prevention programme on guns and young people in Birmingham. Innovative projects like that, she says, are the things that keep people out of prison - and that is well worth spending money on.
It remains to be seen whether, in the coming public spending squeeze, the government will take on board the arguments of people like Donoghue-Mills, that the relatively low levels of spending on such projects can prove their worth, and will not get cut - or whether they, too, will suffer in the overall downturn of public budgets.
She remains cautiously optimistic and a keen advocate for community work. "Everyone needs to be part of a community, especially people who are slightly apart or out of things," she says. "The trouble with institutions, whether they are large hostels or prisons, is that they create little ghettos and people don't think about those inside them. But we need to."
For more on Donoghue-Mills, see Leading Questions, Society Guardian
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
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