Promoting Best Practice
This section of the website seeks to showcase best practice. Too often we fail to share what works well and to replicate this. Here you can find brief outlines of projects that have been acclaimed by credible sources. In other words they do not have to have completed a £20,000 evaluation but we need them to show in some way that their work is considered to be worthy of the title, best practice. Sometimes this source will be HMIE sometimes it will be consistent feedback from users.
Achieve Your Potential
This innovative partnership programme set out to serve some of the most vulnerable young people and to stabilize them in the school system. It has been very successful in recruiting large numbers of volunteers and wider local community support to achieve this goal. It uses volunteer mentors and works together with the parents and schools to help them to achieve their fullest potential.
Click on the link below to view the film of the project recognized as best practice by HMIE.
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/video/y/ymca.asp
This programme was developed by YMCA Scotland to support Boards of Management across the voluntary sector. It tested the model by delivering to 10 voluntary organisations in 2009/2010 and the updated programme is now being developed in partnership with a number of agencies.
PositivelyBoard provides a skilled facilitator to engage with your staff and Board members to consider the stage of development of your organisation, to identify areas for improvement and to provide tools to support that improvement.
It is delivered in the context of your organisation rather than as a generic model and provides the organisation with a concise report containing recommendations and with access to the PositivelyBoard website where you can find over 40 practical tools to use as a Board.
"I thought the whole exercise was good and made us stop and think about what we are doing at present and what direction we want to go in. It made us look and think about what is important to us as an organisation. It showed up some of our flaws and gave us guidance on how we should be moving forward" Board member
For more information on PostivelyBoard click here
Working Towards Excellence
Identified in 2009 by HMIE as best practice, Working Towards Excellence is a quality standards process applicable to every YMCA in Scotland. It aims to raise the standard of every YMCA programme so that children and young people, parents and families, partners, staff and volunteers can all expect consistently safe, healthy and high quality service from the organisation.
It requires every YMCA to bring key stakeholders and partners together to explore how their programmes reflect ten core principles of being a YMCA. These ten principles include How we progress young people's learning and development, how we reflect our Christian ethos through our programmes, how we govern the organisation.
A local YMCA's self assessment is then explored with a small team of volunteer assessors bringing experience from both within and outwith the YMCA movement to the task in hand.
Committed to continuous improvement, Working Towards Excellence identifies both best practice and areas for development. Over the past ten years the process has supported significant improvement in both quality and capacity of YMCA work across the country.