How we work

Comas is an independent community development agency. We receive no core funding and develop our work using grants and commissions. We are not a profit making consultancy. Commissioned work helps us to further our social justice goals.

Commissioning Comas

We provide support services to organisations in the voluntary and public sectors, taking only pieces of work that fit with with our broad values of social justice, resilient communities and people. We provide:

• research
• evaluations
• needs assessments
• organisational development support
• action learning sets
• staff and management coaching

Our ethical promise is to find the most cost effective way of supporting you and only working with you when we are sure our experience matches your needs:

• We are a voluntary organisation dedicated to supporting people and organisations working for change.
• We seek grants and donations to support our work, but we are willing to provide services in Scotland to other organisations, for which we charge a fee to cover our time.
• We aim to be affordable and to provide added value to your cause. We don't charge for stuff you don't need and don't pretend to know what we don't (but we do know quite a lot).
• We will carry out preparatory work with organisations to gain funding to collaborate with us, where your timescale is flexible but your funds are not.
• We are open to working with a consortium of organisations with similar needs on one brief, for the same rate as one organisation, to help you spread the costs. We will try to find synergies between the needs of different organisations to maximise our cost effectiveness and deliver more.
• We are open and transparent in our relationships, clarifying the brief and providing you with time-logs and regular updates. We invite you to comment on and evaluate our work for you as it progresses.
• We ask organisations working with us to allow us to share the tools and models we develop with others, so that we are never paid twice for the same piece of work and benefit is shared across communities.

Our policies