Background

CHeCC has existed since 2005 to respond to the dual challenge of diminishing long-term funding from grants and trusts and the Government’s commitment to the delivery of public services through the voluntary and community sector (VCS).

It was born out of an informal network of VCS organisations delivering community counselling who understood that to expand their ability to attract funding they needed to collaborate as a consortium that ensured quality of provision and a greater uniformity of service delivery to young people across Hertfordshire.

Since its inception, CHeCC has developed in the following ways:

• The CHeCC ‘family’ of member agencies shares a commitment to establishing a consistent level and quality of service across their areas.
• Through the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation programme (CORE) CHeCC has implemented an evaluation tool that enables close monitoring of the improvement in client well-being and the production of sophisticated reports assessing the value of the work undertaken by CHeCC’s member agencies
• In addition to CORE, CHeCC has in place a robust quality assurance framework that has already stood up to several challenges and is embedding required professional and organisational standards.
• CHeCC has undertaken research that demonstrates the broader social and indirect financial benefit of counselling as a preventative service. This research shows that the impact of the service far outstrips its cost.
• Through a Futurebuilders loan CHeCC agencies acquired the resources to thoroughly embed all of these quality assurance practices.

Over the past five years CHeCC has received strong support from the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) and Hertfordshire County Council’s Children, Schools and Families (CSF) commissioning teams. These relationships have resulted in a deeper understanding of how community counselling can work alongside public sector delivery and contribute to public sector targets.