What this contributes, in the terms you have to report in

Equal access to a service

This is the substantive contribution and everything else on this page is secondary to it.

A person who does not share a language with the service in front of them gets a worse version of that service: a shorter conversation, an option not explained, a disclosure not made, or an instruction to come back another day. That is an inequality of access produced by an operational gap rather than by policy, and it falls hardest on people who have arrived recently, who are isolated, or who are in the middle of something urgent.

My Words exists to close the specific part of that gap where an interpreter was never going to be booked: the twenty minutes at a front door. It is not a substitute for interpreting provision, and a service that reduces its interpreting budget on the strength of it has made the inequality worse, not better. That is why the boundary is published and why we will argue against that business case.

How the supplier is constituted

1. A community interest company with an asset lock. C2 Discovery Labs CIC cannot sell this product out of the company for private benefit, and on winding up its assets transfer to another asset-locked body. A service adopting it is not building a dependency on something that can be flipped to an acquirer.
2. Surplus is reinvested in the product, the languages and the research, and the company reports annually to the CIC Regulator on what it did for the community.
3. The application was moved into the CIC from the commercial company that ran the original research and built the proof of concept, at the point it began to matter to the services using it.

Employment and skills

Everyone working on My Words is paid above the National Living Wage. The academic collaborations being arranged are supervised postgraduate placements with a defined output, not unpaid work, and the intention is that the students involved get a publishable piece of research out of it as well as we do.

Environment

The technical footprint is small where we control it and unmeasured where we do not, and we would rather say that than round it to zero. The detail, including the part we cannot yet quantify, is on environmental footprint.

The one effect worth naming here: a conversation that happens today is often a second appointment that does not, and a journey the person does not make. Real, and also unmeasured, so treat it as a reason rather than a claim you can put a number against.

Openness and community benefit beyond your contract

1. The method gets published, including what did not work. What is learned about doing this safely is written up for other services to reuse rather than kept as a differentiator.
2. The limits are published at known limits and safeguards, alongside the explanation of how the product works and written to be handed to staff as they stand.
3. Findings that go against us get published too, with the method attached, once the academic validation produces them.

No lock-in

Every plan is rolling month to month with no minimum term, no notice period and no exit fee. From a procurement point of view that means the commitment you are being asked for is one month, and the risk of adopting it is bounded at that.

What we will not claim

We have no social value figures, no jobs-created number, no carbon figure and no percentage improvement in outcomes. Nobody has measured any of it, the academic work is not finished, and a supplier-generated number in a social value submission is worth less than nothing if it is ever tested.

If your evaluation requires quantified answers in boxes we cannot fill, tell us which ones and we will either say plainly that we cannot evidence them or work out what it would take to. Ask rather than assume.

If you need any of this in a specific format for a submission, ask. It is easier for us to answer the question you actually have to answer than to guess at it.