Impact and Insights Report: Financial Security

Our Impact and Insights Framework (IIF), launched in January this year, guides our approach to learning. It aims to draw a line of sight between the changes we want to see in Scotland and what we do in our work to fund, support, and influence, and helps us understand:

• The difference we make through our own practice as a funder and through our support and influence objectives;
• The outcomes achieved by funded organisations;
• The contributions we make to social change.

As part of this, we're pleased to share our first thematic report focused on Financial Security - one of our key strategic themes. Through this theme, we want to see a Scotland where people are financially secure and able to live lives free of poverty and poverty-related trauma. Our work in this area aims to support greater income adequacy and security, reduced cost-of-living pressures, and strengthened safety nets.

This report is a deep dive into Money Advice services, offering insight into the operating environment for grant holders, the dynamics of the external context, and challenges in supporting people and communities. It explores patterns in practice, relevance to impact, and includes case studies throughout that shine a light on emerging practice, where grant holders are adapting to challenges and testing new ways to increase impact. Case studies include:

• Paying off Debt | Aberlour's Tayside Family Financial Wellbeing Project
  Debt management is one of the most common areas of advice provided by the money advice and financial security services we fund. The Tayside Hardship Fund was established to test the main hypothesis that giving money to families directly will lead to better long-term outcomes for those families. 
• Cash first approaches | Argyll, Lomond and the Islands Energy Agency (ALIenergy)
  We are seeing a shift towards the use of cash-first approaches to provide immediate relief in crisis situations with dignity and respect, rather than provision of emergency food, fuel, goods etc. This involves the provision of cash grants and vouchers, often in conjunction with money advice to meet immediate needs and increase financial security longer term.
• Building employment rights and employment support into money advice services | Roxburgh & Berwickshire CAB and Dumfries and Galloway CAS
  We have a few examples of organisations building employment rights and/or employment support into money advice services. In addition to providing money advice, they are also supporting individuals to access fair work that fits with their circumstances, and increases their income.

What's next?

We will be developing this approach over the rest of this year with a quarterly focus on one of our themes. We are thinking about how we capture and share the implications of what we are learning for what we do more of/ less of, stop and start - with the we including: delivery organisations, funders and the wider system.

You can sign up to our mailing list or follow our social media to keep informed of our Impact and Insights work.