Small Charity Week (15th-20th June) celebrates and raises awareness of the essential work of small charities (defined as charities and CICs that have an annual turnover under £1.5million).
This year, we’re joining in with the celebrations and running special activities and workshops across the week including:
Photo credit: Lotus Carroll / Source / CC BY-NC-SA
It’s that time of year again when we start thinking about our annual report, a review of how, collectively, we have helped to build caring, vibrant and strong communities where everyone can achieve their potential. I enjoy taking a step back and looking at what small differences I may have made throughout the year, so I’m inviting you to take a glimpse of my personal snapshot of 2014-15 (April-March), supporting small community groups, voluntary organisations, charities and social enterprises.
A key finding of our recent survey of local voluntary organisations, charities, community groups and social enterprises was that they would like support raising their profile. We are also looking at ways that we can raise the profile of the work we do at Dudley CVS. We’re starting to think about storytelling – both how we can improve at it, and support others to use it as a tool.
A few Dudley CVS staff are signing up for this free online course, Storytelling for Change. The idea is that by the end of the 7 week course we will:
The course organisers recommend groups of 2-6 people going through the course together. If anyone would like to join our group, or would like us to help co-ordinate additional groups from people in Dudley just leave a comment here, or get in touch via twitter (@DudleyCVS) or email (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk). The course starts on 8 May, and ends on 25 June. You need to register by 22 May. If you’ve never taken an online course before I can highly recommend it. It’s great to work at your own pace, at times that suit you, in places that work for you. I haven’t yet done an online course in a group, so I hope that will add a motivating factor.
Do let us know if you’ve taken any great online courses or are interested in knowing more about them.
Image credit: Walter Lim on Flickr , shared under a Creative Commons licence
I am pleased to share some information with you on a series of events we are co-hosting with Simon Hall from the Black Country Consortium. These events will help you to learn more about the funding opportunities that will become available through European funding in the future.
The Big Lottery Fund is making available £220M against a similar figure from the European Social Fund (ESF). These funds are available to support communities and people most in need with the following priority areas:
Funding will be delivered through Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) paying particular attention to the above local priorities. Examples of work that could qualify for support are:
The briefing will outline both the ESF/Big Lottery priorities and the expectations of the Black Country LEP around each of these themes and how you could potentially get involved.
The same briefing will be run on three different occasions as follows:
To book please click on the appropriate link above.
In December 2014, Dudley CVS carried out a state of the sector online survey. The time felt right for Dudley CVS to explore:
Once the findings were collected, NAVCA, our National body, helped Dudley CVS to analyse the results. Caroline Beavon then helped us to produce a colourful infographic poster as a creative way to share the findings with the voluntary sector and partners across Dudley borough. You can view the infographic report here: http://issuu.com/dcvs/docs/sots_-_v9/1
On 24th March, a CoLab enquiry session was held to explore further the results with voluntary sector groups and to dig deeper into the findings.
The survey was divided into the following three categories:
This report presents more detail on findings from our survey and outcomes from discussions held on 24th March with voluntary and community sector organisations and partners. To view the report click on the link below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8-GKntyzIXkZldtWGZhOHpwN2M/view?usp=sharing
Photo credit: mkhmarketing / Foter / CC BY
A study published by Lloyds Bank has reported that more than half of charities lack ‘basic digital skills’, especially compared with small business. You can read the full report here.
The study particularly focuses on the lack of understanding about how a web presence can increase donations and other forms of finance, but it also chimes with one of Dudley CVS’s priorities for the forthcoming year and one of the key findings of our recent state of the sector survey – voluntary and community organisations would like some support with telling their stories online.
Being able to demonstrate your impact online, at a time when organisations cannot solely rely on grant-funding alone to survive, might expose your organisation to new sponsors, supporters, crowd-funders, investors, donors, businesses looking to fulfil their corporate social responsibility principles. But the reasons may not be purely financial. Having a web presence can be empowering for your organisation and the people you support; you can run campaigns, dispel myths, inspire people, connect, share and learn.
But what do you think? What do you think about the report? What has an online presence allowed you to do more easily? What are the barriers to getting your organisation on the web? Is it resources, skills in tech and design or anything else? How could we all support each other to grasp new opportunities that the digital world might offer?
On Tuesday 3rd March, Dudley CVS welcomed the community into Brierley Hill Civic Hall to gather people’s visions for building it into a vibrant hub for a variety of activities and events.
Imagine you have an idea for an activity in your community, something open to all, that people could take part in every week. There are often lots of things which get in the way of getting such ideas started, even simply to try them out to see if they work. Rooms for community activities cost money to hire (understandably). Funders need groups to have lots of paperwork in place. And they often assume you know everything you need to at the beginning. There isn’t much scope for learning from experience and adapting things as you go. It’s easy to see why lots of great ideas never get off the ground. And why lots of rooms in community venues often sit empty, without these amazing activities taking place in them.
Which is why it is so exciting for Dudley CVS to be working on something which is re-thinking how things usually work. Our starting point is discovering all sorts of amazing things in Wrens Nest which can support projects – rooms and resources in a the community centre, skills and talents people have and want to share, ideas of things people want to do together. Open Hub is the name given to this platform we’re creating to nurture local projects and enterprises.
On the 2nd of February this year two mums from Wrens Nest Estate took part in an Open Hub project co-design session. In just over an hour we shared visions for the community, discovered all sorts of skills and talents we each had, looked at some projects started in other parts of the world, and designed a Stay & Play project. The first session took place 3 days later and has been running weekly since. Promoted through Facebook and word-of-mouth to begin with, 8 families (that’s 13 kids) joined in during in the first 5 weeks.
On 24th of February five local residents took part in a session to co-design a cooking project focused on healthy eating and trying out recipes from Slimmers World. A week later 13 adults and 4 kids got together to cook their first meal and eat together. They have been getting together to cook and eat each week since.
We’re still in the middle of lots of learning and testing of how to create these completely new ways of working, and we will share this in due course. In the meantime we’ll be making all the individual project designs and resources we’ve developed open source, so that anyone can borrow and build on them. To find out more contact me (lorna@dudleycvs.org.uk) or add a comment right here on this blog.
Nine hospitals and 14 GP-led bids have been given part of £200m funding to provide integrated primary, secondary and social care. The approval of the ‘vanguard’ projects marks the next major stage in the implementation of NHS chief executive Simon Stevens’ Five-Year Forward View.
NHS England said that there were 269 applications from groups of nurses, doctors and other health and social care staff. In all, 29 bids were approved, including six bids by care homes.
The two main new models of care – the GP-led ‘multi-specialty community providers’ (MCPs) and the hospital-led ‘primary and acute care systems’ (PACS) – were included as part of NHS England’s Five-Year Forward View.
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