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The big society rhetoric has been about power to local communities. Then, along came community organisers, a government imposed doctrine on how local communities should be developed.
Local development and support organisations have been successfully doing community development for years – the issue has been funding and resourcing this work. Read more »
The idea that small, even medium to large, local voluntary organisations will be able to hold a contract on the scale they are now being let is becoming impossible to imagine. And this isn’t confined to one area of delivery. In the last week alone, partners have highlighted this issue in regard to the Work Programme (around the size of sub-contracts), tenders relating supporting families with multiple issues and in the changing world of offender management. Read more »
I agree with David Cameron on this: the Government making U-turns on some of their policy proposals does not necessarily indicate weakness and can be a positive indicator that they are prepared to listen to constructive
criticism and admit to making mistakes. In the rush to bring in radical changes it seems clear to many of us that mistakes have been made. I believe he is right to acknowledge that. Read more »
One of the huge benefits of working
for a charity is meeting a wide variety of interesting and exciting people -
the most important for me being the residents at Nightingale, the care home
which I run. We accommodate some 200 older people, each of whom has a
fascinating story to tell about their lives.
The revelations surrounding phone hacking at the News of the World
constitute perhaps the most damaging scandal to hit the media in a
generation. Public confidence in
the Fourth Estate, or at least some sections of it, has been badly hit,
prompting calls for a wholesale change in the UK’s media culture. But what does this changing media
landscape mean for charities?
I, like
everyone else, was pleased to see the Government announce the Transition Fund -
you couldn’t possibly be against it could you? Of course, the size of the fund
does little to address the scale of cuts in the sector, but then it wasn’t
meant to fund more of the same. It was about helping organisations make
a change to how they went about their business and helping them increase
sustainability.
The last month has marked the start of a range of new work
programmes and partnerships. At a strategic level we are looking to the future
with partners. There is a sense of a new chapter with many previous absolutes
open to debate. That’s not to say that all things will come to fruition.
Concepts such as localism and big society are still evolving ideas with
competing notions. However, the process of remodelling our civic landscape is
now under way after the shock of many of the cuts. It is as exciting as it is
daunting.
In my last
contribution, I concentrated on the good news that the cuts to our funding
would be less severe than first thought and would be spread over two years
rather than all coming upfront in this financial year.
We are in difficult financial times,we keep hearing, and yet no one mentions that our taxes are funding bankers’
bonuses and wars in Afghanistan and Libya rather than essential local services.
While the world around us sinks further in despair, we seem
to be riding the storm. Our organisation, Her Centre, won a new contract to provide two
domestic violence advocates, and lost 40 per cent of our old grant funding at the same
time. The council, provider of both, felt that we couldn’t complain due to the
new work. We did appeal and were
able to get a small start up grant as the new service led to a move.
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