On Wednesday November 20th, our CEO Rebecca Mear took the views, voice, challenges and successes of the VCSE sector in Bristol to Parliament. Attending as a member of both NAVCA and NCVO, Voscur’s CEO was invited to share insights to shape the proposed Civil Society Covenant to the All Party Parliamentary Group for Charities and Volunteering.
Chaired by the MP for Durham, Mary Kelly Foy – herself a former employee of a VCSE Local Infrastructure Organisation (similar to Voscur) in Durham, the APPG is attended by a cross-party group of elected politicians from the House of Commons and members from the House of Lords.
Rebecca was able to share our collective insights on what Bristol’s VCSE sector think about a Civil Society Covenant based on the following Strategic Voice and Influence mechanisms, run by Voscur:
This represented a unique opportunity to shape the future Covenant, based on your feedback, your experiences running VCSE organisations, and your expertise.
Our thanks go to everyone who shared their ideas and experiences with us.
What Voscur shared with Parliament: Rebecca challenged the APPG members to imagine what could be achieved if we allow community organisations to define the outcomes to achieve real social change, as well as how to deliver the outcome.
Voscur’s feedback was themed along the four high level principles of the proposed Covenant:
Recognise the long-term approach and investment required if we are truly to make real social change, driven by community organisations. It will need to come away from 6- or 12-month funding streams, and the precarity of being tied in with election cycles, on to a much more long-term basis.
Recognise the small, medium and micro organisations in the VCSE sector; large national charities can skew the picture and understanding of what the VCSE sector is if we only pay attention to them in policy-making. Differentiate between the different types of VCSE organisation and avoid making generalisations based on just one or two types.
Trust: the VCSE sector are saying “Just trust us.”
VCSE organisations are challenging the public sector to “imagine what we could do with more resourcing and less onerous reporting that appears to go nowhere.”
Can we realign how we invest funding to target more and more in-depth community-driven solutions and community-led services, rather than often disproportionately high levels of bureaucracy.
VCSE sector leaders are urging the public sector and government to recognise the innovation and the aspects of VCSE sector that make our work unique and effective. This is particularly a risk when VCSE organisations become agents of the state through taking on commissioned services: how can commissioners ensure that the innovation and community-driven nature of our work is not lost?
Recognise what makes our work in the VCSE sector special, but also that it is requires funding and investment: “We can be agile but we are not free”
Recognise the regional differences - the regional area in which we operate (West of England) has a number of non-coterminous borders between different public sector institutions, it places the burden on the VCSE sector to accommodate these differences in order to work in partnership with the public sector.
VCSE organisations want increased trust from the public sector, and they want the public sector to address the power imbalances inherent in funding relationships.
They urge the Covenant to address issues around control: how can public sector commissioners or funders be given a framework that enables VCSE sector innovation, rather than limits it?
How can VCSE organisations be resourced to work in partnership with the public sector from the very beginning stages of designing services and initiatives?
How can officials within public sector institutions be supported and enabled to work in partnership with the VCSE sector as enablers of community organisation-led activity, not as designers of it?
Public sector institutions should be incentivised to commission out to the VCSE sector wherever possible, and to avoid the temptation to in-house services.
Due to the cuts to jobs in public sector, VCSE organisations often face a situation where their commissioner also being their collaborator: this can be hugely challenging and risks losing innovation within both outcomes and delivery.
There are perceptions that the VCSE sector doesn’t work well together and is competitive with each other as organisations. This is learned behaviour caused by competitive commissioning processed and being forced to compete with one another. Again, by investing in partnership working, the public sector can play a part in addressing this.
The Covenant represents an opportunity for the public sector to shift to understanding themselves as enablers of community sector-driven change, not as the only decision-makers. What barriers can they remove for VCSE organisations?
Invest in how we surface insights from community organisation and the ecosystem knowledge and understanding.
More decision-making to be devolved to local level and community-organisation-led decision making to be explored.
What could be possible if we inverted the partnership approach and allowed VCSE organisations to lead on the forming of strategy and intended outcomes; if public sector came to VCSE spaces and worked closely as enablers with us?
What could be possible is we inverted the approach and had public sector come out to VCSE organisations and enable a framework that asks “what problems can you see?” and offers “how can we support you and invest in your solutions to that problem?”
The right information to best serve people and communities is not necessarily feeding into public sector institutions due to the power imbalances inherent in insecure, short-term funding cycles, and resulting workforce instability in the VCSE sector.
Workforce recruitment and retention issues are colossal in the VCSE sector, due mainly to the face the sector isn’t invested in to offer the same level of salary or Terms and Conditions as other sectors.
Psychological safety and relational approaches to working together are fundamental, but in order to achieve this, the system needs people staying in these organisations within both the VCSE sector and the public sector.
Understand the impact of Employers NIC rises announced in the Autumn budget on VCSE organisations whose reserves – both financial and emotional – are already depleted by the pandemic, followed by the cost of living crisis, which led to costs and demands rising in parallel, and now further increased costs.
87% of local VCSE organisations responding to a Quickfire survey which Voscur sent out responded that the increased Employers NIC will negatively impact their budgets, with increased costs from responding organisations averaging 4.8%. This is likely to lead to either decreased services or the need to cut expenditure, around salary levels or staff posts.
Data – public institutions want VCSE sector to demonstrate data-driven, evidence-based decisions – yet there are few VCSE organisations reporting an investment from the public sector in data collection or analysis.
VCSE sector organisations spend a great deal of time on Monitoring and Evaluation, but note that feel as if more can be done to learn from the Monitoring and Evaluation together, transparently and collectively.
The Social Value act could play an important part in how the public sector could commission VCSE sector more effectively. To achieve this, we need to address the fact that commissioning model assumes a bidding organisation is a private sector one, and thus bidding organisations need to do extra to achieve Social Value. This disadvantages VCSE sector organisations in procurement and biases towards large private sector organisations getting contracts, only using VCSE as “bid candy” at best.
It’s important to give public institutions enough time with their budgets so that it doesn’t impact commissioned or funded VCSE organisations who receive their budgets very late – at the point where they may have already begun redundancy processes or winding down existing projects as a result of late incoming budgets.
We share the following good examples:
Ambition Lawrence Weston is an inspiring example of what happens when communities are invested in to drive forward their own solutions. Lawrence Weston was an area which the Big Local Trust gave £1million to over ten years, to be invested as the community saw fit. The community came together, established Ambition Lawrence Weston, and went on to lead on multiple innovations. In order to enable long-term funding coming into their community for their activities, they have sourced further investment in a community-owned wind turbine, which will have a Net Zero impact as well as fund their community’s vision.
At Bristol City Council, there has been great practice in developing and delivering participatory grant making processes – involving VCSE organisations. They have also developed an institutional approach to paying VCSE organisations for their time and expertise in participating in coproduction and strategy working groups.
At Voscur, we have launched an Ecosystem Resilience panel this Autumn where we gather senior decision-makers from the One City partners group to work with us on enabling the VCSE sector. It aims to understand the successes and innovation led by the VCSE sector, and to build further upon them, while also understanding and mitigating where possible the risks in the sector caused by rising costs, rising demands.
Within the VCSE Alliance, we have recently coproduced with the Integrated Care Board a Brokerage framework. This has launched and has begun the process of collaboratively enabling grant funding to get out to the VCSE organisations – particularly smaller organisations - through a fair and transparent mechanism.
You can also see the write-up from Civil Society Media here:
‘Poor timing’ for Civil Society Covenant, parliamentary group hears