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Across the sector we are asked to be innovative,
imaginative and leaders in the new world. For the big society to work we are
told we need to be inventive and inclusive. We are asked to make use of the
resources of our communities.
Tag Archives: cuts
The voluntary process
We are so grateful to volunteers who provide services we couldn’t fund ourselves
I was lucky enough, when I managed our refuge, to follow the
progress of one of our clients – let’s call her Jo. She arrived as a woman who
had suffered both physical and sexual abuse at the hands of a violent partner. She was emotionally distressed and financially
bankrupt and used our services for almost two years. Over that period, Jo changed from a terrified, broken victim
to a confident woman, for whom life was full of hope and opportunity. The
transformation was inspiring to watch.
Our annual lunch has to be carefully planned because so much depends on it
We are worrying about menus and name cards, parking spaces
and canapés. We are finalising the timing for the appeal and booking taxis for
the guest speaker. We are hoping that our guests enjoy their carefully selected
meal and that they will enjoy chatting to their neighbours. We have strategically placed board and
staff members on tables to bring the discussion back to the matter at hand.
The changing world of commissioners
Commissioners seem to be leaving it to us to
tell them what they want these days. Why is this? We are used to having every
detail of a service specified at the outset. Factors like how many staff, how
many clients, where and when the service will open and a host of other details
used to be decided before funding is agreed.
Working in silos
The work we all do as charities is often difficult to quantify in
financial terms, as I explored in my previous blog. We are constantly asked to prove our cost effectiveness for
each individual budget to justify our worth. On paper this sounds reasonable.
In practice silos make it impossibly flawed.
Downsizing does not make you more effective unless you were over-staffed before
Healthy Living Wessex is a not for profit social
enterprise and, like every other organisation in the new civil society, we are
struggling to survive the cuts and infrastructure changes.
I have not blogged
recently as I am tired of being a grumpy old woman. Until now I have always
been an optimist. I have always seen the bigger positive outcomes of any hard
change, but no more. I await the light and have restructured my company to
SURVIVE. This is not to make it more efficient or more effective, as it was this
before.
What? Collaboration again? But maybe we can make it work……
Careful what you wish for, my granny used to say. National
media interest in our sector that we would have given our last Rolo for a year
ago. And we’re so busy working out
how we fit into the new world and how we’ll hang on long enough to be a part of
the cake-sharing, we can’t appreciate it.
Robust evidence is needed to prove the false economy of cuts
Proving the value of services has always been essential to attract funding.
But when money’s tight we have to go beyond measuring impact on beneficiaries,
to the wider value for society. There is a robust economic argument to be made
by identifying the cost to the public purse if valuable services are cut.
Thinking outside the funding box
Charities have been delivering crucial
public services long before the term big society was coined.
Often created in response to a social need
that was not being met by the state, these charities now provide national
services that form part of the social safety net people have a right to expect
in a civilised society.
While government initiatives take shape we have to make decisions
Norfolk RCC is a community development organisation that
specialises in social action, community engagement and local self-help
solutions.
A shameless plug, but also to say that what we do, and have
always done, is exactly the current agenda. While the vocabulary has changed
with the new government, the core is the same. We therefore see many
opportunities for us – in fact almost too many to pursue sensibly at once.
