DRAFT SECTION ON FUNDING, CONTRACTING AND INVESTMENT

Many voluntary and community organisations in Bristol feel that the relationship between themselves and their funders is a good one. The Compact will build on existing good practice and aim to create more consistency in funding processes between agencies in the City. It will cover grants, service level agreements and commissioning and will clarify the differences between these processes.

It is accepted that long-term funding agreements are beneficial for both funders and funded organisations. Funding agreements will be for as long as practicable and an appropriate length of time will be agreed for each project (this will include short-term project funding and feasibility work as well as on-going funding).

Wherever possible the partners to the Compact are committed to introducing coordinated funding processes with:

• common forms,
• model agreements,
• information sharing,
• ·clear open baseline standards,
• joint monitoring and
• integrated timescales for funding systems and notice periods for the withdrawal of funding.

It is agreed to set up a Joint Funding Working Group to address these issues. This will report to the Bristol Partnership by December 2003.

Monitoring

The Compact gives a commitment to working to set out a good practice approach to accountability and monitoring for financial support to the voluntary and community sector and aims to adopt this standard by all sections within the Council and other partners to the Compact by December 2003. This approach is intended to minimise the burden of monitoring on voluntary and community organisations, whilst maintaining proper accountability. This will include a commitment to shared monitoring and evaluation processes, including the identification of a lead funder and an agreement that assessments of an organisation by one agency are accepted by others. It will also give an agreement to user evaluation of funding processes.

The partners to the Compact will work to establish a unified Bristol Small Grants Pot for grants up to £10,000 with a single application process and monitoring procedures by April 2004. This will follow the model of the Government Office South West’s Small Grants Action Plan.

Agencies provide support to voluntary and community organisations through a number of other resources, including secondment of staff and management support, free or low cost access to community buildings, sharing of other resources (eg computers and vehicles), training, community development and fundraising support (eg Funderfinder). These are acknowledged as important benefits which demonstrate the extent of mutual support which already exists. It is noted that community and voluntary sector groups also provide their knowledge, skills and resources to statutory agencies.

A commitment is given to set out a series of best practice standards when acting as a landlord to voluntary and community sector organisations by December 2003.