From Result to Impact - The UIA Project "home & care" on the Way to Sustainable Implementation - Journal N° 3

1. City of Landshut
2. Kinderstiftung "Zukunft für alle Kinder" - NGO
3. Heilig-Geistspitalstiftung Landshut - NGO
4. ZAK e.V. Landshut - NGO
5. Klinikum Landshut - private company
6. LAKUMED - private company
7. University of Applied Sciences Landshut
8. Fachakademie für Sozialpädagogik der Schulstiftung Seligenthal - Training center

Following the completion of the pilot phase, the project is now in the implementation phase. There is no longer any special funding for development and testing. Instead, sustainable use must now be achieved from the state of the previous project. For the "home & care" project, it can be noted that five different projects can be linked to the project, all of which have reached an intermediate stage. The five projects are:
•    construction project - planning, building and operating a house in which various ideas that were previously structurally separate have been implemented together
•    training project - development and implementation of concepts to offer training to people who previously had few opportunities for vocational training
•    integration project - creating a common community of different people in the house itself and with the residents in the neighborhood
•    care project - setting up new childcare models to provide care for the children of single parents working in shifts
•    networking project - bringing together organizations in a network that have never worked together before but are involved with the same group of people
 

2.1    Introduction to the challenge addressed
At the end of the pilot phase, the project partners were faced with the question of whether the project was successful or not. To this end, the original project objectives in the application had to be compared with the results at the end of the project. It quickly became apparent that the assumptions concerning success from the start of the project were not sufficient to be able to identify and analyze the multiple derivations of the project results holistically. For this reason, all results were collected and evaluated together. The challenge in the project is now to put the results of the model to the stakeholders who are responsible for disseminating and applying the model's findings in the traditional structures.

3.1 General overview
The table below displays an overview of the UIA challenges and how they are translated for the home and care project, indicating by means of a traffic-light color code the level of according to this first journal released and the status of the project.

3.2 Leadership
At the final project meeting, the project managers made it clear that the implementation of the project involved an enormous amount of management work, which had not been seen to this extent beforehand. The main focus was on the immediate implementation of the construction project and the coordination of the network of stakeholders involved. Due to the difficulties during the construction phase and the coming together of the stakeholders as a network, the management's resources were used to solve existing problems. This left no room for analyzing the project experiences, interpreting them from a management perspective and integrating them into the discourse of the administrative management and local politics. To ensure the progress of the project, the coordination office concentrated on the facilitation and documentation of the processes.

3.3 Public procurement
After this project component played an enormous role in the previous stages of the process, the completion of the building means that public procurement is now largely complete.

3.4 Cross-department working
In discussions with the project coordinators, it became clear that there is positive cooperation with parts of the administration. For example, the cooperation works very well in the area of the youth welfare office, for example with regard to the organization of childcare. In other areas, the coordination finds it much more difficult to establish effective cooperation as a staff unit outside of the regular structures.  The coordinators believe there is sometimes an administrative fear of making decisions and a diffusion of responsibility, which is exacerbated by the shortcomings in project management described above. For example, the clarification of the amount of rent and the drafting of tenancy agreements has created major challenges in terms of who is actually responsible and who assumes technical responsibility. Progress is emerging in the stronger assumption of responsibility by the city through the introduction of facility management.

3.5 Participative approach
The trend towards greater participatory involvement has continued since the last journal. The project partners have managed to see themselves as a network and the project coordinators have succeeded in bundling the various interests in the network. A major success is that employers and social organizations involved in the project were able to resolve conflicts in the project development in such a way that a common understanding could emerge and trust could be built. The way in which partners worked together in the project, who would otherwise never have become involved in such structured cooperation, is particularly positive.
Involving the residents in the organization of living together continues to be a challenge. The aim here is to develop a structure that enables participation from the perspective of the people who live and work there. Strategic participation of the people who are neighbors of the "home & care" building must also be established. With the existing facility management, there is now a level at which this participation is planned.

3.6 Monitoring and evaluation
After a lot of difficulties from the concept phase to the start-up phase, the scientific support was able to fully fulfill its tasks following a change in personnel at the Landshut University of Applied Sciences. An operational level was set up in which the agreed process steps can finally be implemented.  Cooperation has been established that is perceived as useful by the project partners and enables the development of an atmosphere of trust. The frequent personnel changes in the scientific support team, which had a detrimental effect, were brought to an end.

3.7 Communication
With the appointments in the communications office which is in the coordination team, a functioning communication system has been established. This is done with an internal newsletter from the coordinator to the project partners. And at the same time, tools such as small video clips were developed to provide information to the outside world and create access to target groups, for example. Due to the closure of the coordination office, it was no longer possible to provide communication from one single office quite some time before the end of the project. This also prevented the creation of communication structures that would have had a lasting effect beyond the end of the project.

3.8 Upscaling
The intensified and now established cooperation between the very different project partners has now actually led to forms of cooperation in which partners have come together who would never have found any common ground without such a project. For example, the coordination between the nursing service managers, who are responsible for the deployment of the nursing staff, and the social organizations, which simultaneously care for and support these nursing staff as single mothers, serves as an excellent match between the world of work and the lifeworld. This enabled the project to be implemented as planned. However, it was not possible to ensure that the network would continue to exist and that knowledge would be transferred to local politicians and other municipalities.
 

Following the successful opening of the "home & care" building in September 2022, people have actually moved into the facility and are using the care and support services. The web articles that have already been published show what has been successful and how "home & care" deals with the challenges in the building. During the last meeting of all project partners in July 2023, it became clear that there had indeed been productive cooperation between the stakeholders from very different fields. At the same time, however, it also became clear that no analysis had yet been carried out as to what can be learned from the experience, how the project can be secured in the long term and how other municipalities can learn from the project experience.