The Dublin City Community Cooperative goes live on Elemental

The Dublin City Community Cooperative Society Limited (‘the Co-op’) was established in November 2014. They are an alliance of 13 grassroots, Dublin inner city, community development organisations which work to ensure the much needed development and delivery of social, economic and cultural services continues within their communities. 

The Co-op is aiming to implement a sustainable social prescribing model which will support the community to develop more positive health behaviours, improve health literacy, develop social supports and increase uptake of screening and immunisation services which will have a long term impact on the community’s health in an effort to reduce the health inequalities experienced by  in the northeast inner city of Dublin.

The Co-op is working in partnership with Think-Tank for Action on Social Change (TASC)  to capture specific learnings from the ways in which social prescribing programmes have been implemented, utilised and evaluated. 

The use of Elemental will support the Co-op and TASC in the development of a robust monitoring, reporting and evaluation mechanism that will capture the learning and measure the outcomes from the delivery of the project. 

The Co-op aims to:

• Develop a model of Social Prescribing within the area. 
• Support local people who have an interest in health issues to become a resource within their local community.
• Promote participation in the community in activities which improve the health and wellbeing of the local community and support them to access services which address their health needs.
• Develop sustainable partnerships with relevant statutory, non-governmental and community and voluntary organisations including General Practitioners, Primary Care, Mental Health Services and Dublin City Council. 

Catherine Heaney, Healthy Communities Project Coordinator, Dublin City Community Cooperative

“It is great to be introducing a database system specifically designed for social prescribing programmes, which records all relevant data and tracks the progress of our clients through our programme.  Information and easy access to our data is critical for our day to day work so we look forward to Elemental supporting us in this regard. 

The Co-op chose Elemental because of its reporting capabilities, its responsive team and its specific focus on and experience of social prescribing programmes.”

Jennifer Neff, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elemental Software

“We are delighted to announce that Dublin City Community Cooperative have gone live on Elemental. The community development organisation delivers vital social, economic and cultural services to their community. Through Elemental they will be able to further promote the services available in the area to local people, increasing engagement with the activities. Elemental will also enable them to better track, monitor and report on the engagement and impact of their social prescribing programme.”