ITRS Group Corporate Social Responsibility provides IT support for Scottish Charities
ITRS staff from the Edinburgh Office have been supporting two Scottish Charities, Bethany Christian Trust (BCT) and Glasgow City Mission (GCM) in their work in providing emergency accommodation for people who would otherwise be sleeping rough. BCT runs the Rapid Re-accommodation Welcome Centre in Edinburgh, and GCM the Glasgow Overnight Welcome Centre in Glasgow. During 2020/21 BCT supported 860 guests and GCM 203 guests. Both organisations work with councils and other specialist support services to address the needs of guests and help them move on to more suitable accommodation. Working with an outside developer, ITRS staff have helped to provide and run a custom built web-based application that enables the charities to administer the centres, book in guests, record personal details and needs for help, monitor capacity, pass relevant information to other services where required and generate statistics to feed back to sponsors and the Scottish Government.
Ruth Longmuir, BCTs Welcome Centre Manager writes: "Having a purpose-built IT system for registering our guests has made a huge impact on the way we work. It allows us to collect more information about guests and store the data in an easily accessible format that can be updated when needed. With the changes to the service necessitated by the pandemic, it has allowed us to better assess people’s support needs and therefore link them in with appropriate services."
ITRS staff from the Edinburgh Office are also currently developing a web-based application to provide Linlithgow Young People's Project (LYPP), a youth work organisation working with young people in Linlithgow and the surrounding areas with the means to record details of programmes, sessions, young people and their participation. Like many similar organisations, LYPP needs to provide information back to sponsoring organisations detailing how their money has been used and what has been achieved in terms of services provided and the development of the young people themselves. This has necessitated meticulous time-consuming paper-based record keeping and analysis of questionnaires before and after completion of programmes. The application is designed to relieve this administrative burden and free up more time for youth workers to engage with the young people they are supporting.
