The EFL Trust is the charitable arm of the English Football League (EFL) and was established in 2008 to oversee the remarkable and diverse work of EFL’s Club Community Organisations (CCOs).
Our vision is ‘Stronger, Healthier, More Active Communities.’
We use the power of the Club badge and the affinity countless numbers of people have to their team, to deliver a wide range of community initiatives focusing on raising people’s aspirations and quality of life.
Our core purpose remains to support the CCOs in our network to help us achieve our vision.
We focus on:
- Improving health and wellbeing
- Raising aspirations and realising potential
- Building stronger, more cohesive communities
The network engages with over 880,000 participants every year, has over 3,500 working on CCO delivered projects and invests over £59m in their community every year.
The EFL Trust aims to support the network by securing programmes for our CCOs to deliver significant impact in their communities.
Recently the EFL Trust undertook the Merlin Standard assessment to help them provide the best supply chain they can to their wide network of suppliers.
The purpose of the Merlin Standard is to support the development, recognition and promotion of sustainable excellence, and positive partnership working within supply chains. The Merlin Standard is built upon 8 fundamental and integrated Principles:
- Design,
- Procure,
- Contract,
- Funding,
- Develop,
- Performance Manage,
- QA & Compliance,
- Review & Close.
Within each Principle, there are a number of Criteria, which provide a structured approach to achieving excellence in supply chain management.
We discussed the Merlin Standard with Michelle and her colleagues to find out;
- How does being assessed add value to your business/trust,
- What value did you get from the assessment?
- What was your expereince with Assessment Services?
How does being assessed against a standard benefit your business?
The EFL Trust’s mission and main purpose is to support our network of 72 Club Community Organisations. These charities make up our national supply chain delivering a wide breadth of projects and programmes to improve the health, wellbeing, education, employability and inclusion across EFL Football Clubs communities. Assessing ourselves against the Merlin standard, which focuses on the quality of every aspect of our support, information, advice and guidance to our supply chain is an extremely thorough and robust way to provide assurance around the standards we are delivering and where we can continually improve further.
What value did you get from this assessment?
We provided ourselves, our supply chain partners and our Board of Trustees with the assurance that we are meeting or progressing with our objective of being a “best in class” service provider to our supply chain. We are also able to pinpoint areas of further focused improvement and show our staff the value of their input on a day to day basis.
What was your experience with Assessment Services and your assessor?
The support provided by Assessment Services was excellent, both before, during and after the assessment submission they were helpful and informative, all queries were answered promptly and the feedback sessions were thorough and constructive.
