The Quality Development Initiative (QDI) aims to enable advice-giving organisations to develop their organisational capacity and quality standards though one to one development support and access to a small grant of up to £5000 to pay for items linked to the development needs of the organisation.

The project operates in the following boroughs:

• Ealing, Hounslow, Hillingdon, Richmond, Kingston (July 2001 – June 2002)
• Croydon, Merton, Sutton, Bromley, Bexley (July 2002 – June 2003)
• Barnet, Harrow, Brent, Enfield (July 2003 – June 2004)

There are three main elements to the project:

• The provision of practical support and consultancy to individual advice and community groups, via a detailed organisational assessment of their services against national standards for quality of advice and the formulation of a development action plan. This support and consultancy will be delivered by development staff of the partner organisations and a QDI Project fieldworker employed by Lasa.
• Access to bursaries of up to £5000 to enable groups to put their development plans into action. Bursaries could cover items such as training, information resources, IT equipment, consultancy or buying access to other resources needed to achieve the advice service improvements prioritised in the development plan. This could include groups coming together to pool funds for joint benefit.
• Assistance and support to foster better networking, planning, resources and information sharing and improved referral arrangements between local advice providers to create a more coordinated advice service for local people.

A variety of projects will be supported:

The project aims to provide support to 30 organisations in each year of the project. In selecting organisations to participate in QDI the consortium will ensure that 50% of organisations selected will be smaller organisations defined as: 2 or less full time paid staff in the advice service side of the organisation.

In selecting both small and larger organisations the consortium will select a variety of organisations to ensure that a range of different advice services can be involved in QDI and that they reflect as far as possible the needs for advice in the local borough:

• Services working with older people, disabled people, young people or homeless people, generalist and specialist services
• Services working with refugees
• Services run for and by Black and Ethnic Minority communities, including services for Women
• Organisations that have not received a significant amount of development support in the past related to the core areas covered by the assessment — this is defined as development support of over 5 days within the last two years from one of the advice networks, other coordination and support organisations or freelance consultants.

The project will be evaluated at the end of each year to feed into the next year's work and there will be a final evaluation when the project ends.

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