History

Caer Las started out over thirty years ago as a small hostel providing beds for the homeless in Swansea.  Since then, we’ve grown the range and spread of our services throughout South Wales.  We now work with a host of issues including mental health, personal development and basic skills as well as continuing to prevent homelessness. 

Working across a range of issues has shown us how they are often interrelated and linked to social exclusion.  So we took a good look at the organisation to see how we could work more effectively, both with clients and the wider community, to reduce and prevent experience of social exclusion.  We realised that this would require a shift from being solely a provider of direct services to an organisation that also helps to inform social change and policy.

Although services are essential to all of our clients, we felt that there was more we could do by digging deeper and identifying the root causes of social exclusion. Only through developing a better understanding of these can we develop and pilot long-term solutions.  And the findings from these can help inform social change, through providing policy makers with a good understanding of grassroots issues.

In preparation for this shift, we introduced a more progressive approach that gives clients greater involvement in the development of services.  Their needs remain central to our aspirations so who better to be involved in this process?  Individual project teams have been empowered through a restructure that enables them to ‘self-manage’ service delivery and day to day operations, with guidance and support from the senior management team.  This allows teams to use their local knowledge and experience to support client needs more flexibly and responsively, and releases senior management resource to focus on new developments.

In recent years we’ve been putting the finishing touches to this phase of change.   All frontline staff have embarked on a comprehensive training programme that supports their evolving roles, including the responsibilities of self-management.  The senior management team has been redefined and boosted with additional resource to strengthen and support the structure and ethos.

These changes have laid the foundations for a new phase of innovative developments in our commitment to tackling social exclusion.