Carolina House Trust

Established in 1815, Carolina House Trust is one of Scotland’s oldest children’s charities, supporting foster carers to offer family-based care to children and young people who cannot live with their own family for as long as it is needed.

Nicola Donnelly has been the Marketing and Recruitment Officer at Carolina House Trust for six years. She describes how growing productivity ensures the organisation provides an excellent service to foster carers and young people within a challenging financial climate. She sees this challenge as one that the Trust willingly takes on; to be more innovative and think smarter in order to be more successful.

Central to meeting the productivity challenge has been the Trust’s Growth Mindset culture which is a way of working that is not only adopted by staff but also role modelled for the benefit of the foster carers and young people that they work with. It is an approach that members of the Trust’s team presented at one of the Peer Works events.

Nicola and her colleagues have attended several Peer Works events. Working in the third sector and social care, but with relationships and partnerships with organisations across the board, Nicola feels that the topics and speakers at the sessions help the charity to stay up to date with what is going on in other areas. She also sees the events as an opportunity to promote the charity saying, “you never know when you’ll meet your next foster carer”.

Nicola has picked up several tips as a result of attendance at events which have made it to her ‘to action list’, most recently a session on social media presented by a leader in SSEN who “was happy to share what they had learned from making mistakes” prompted her to make changes.

Nicola suggests that Peer Works is an effective support to small to medium sized organisations in public, private and third sectors.

“Peers Works brings like minded people and organisations together, organisations that want to learn and grow. Your status doesn’t matter, you don’t have to commit to a membership and it is free of charge to attend workshops. It’s very easy to dip in and out of depending on your business priorities at any time.”