Volunteering England warmly welcomes the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit Strategic Funding Review consultation. We are broadly in support of the proposals it contains.
We would like to offer some suggestions as to ways in which we believe that the proposals can be strengthened.
We have carefully considered what we believe to be the key strategic funding responsibility of the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit. We see this as working to support organisations which can assist a wide range of other agencies to meet the Unit's objectives - that is that strategic funding should primarily target infrastructure rather than service delivery in order to maximise impact. This would link to the sixth function of volunteering infrastructure, as described in Building on success and referenced in the Compact code on volunteering - the strategic development of volunteering.
In answer to your specific questions:
Do you agree these are the right strategic criteria for the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit? Are there other criteria which we should include as well as or instead of these?
Comments on proposed strategic criteria
We are in broad support of your proposals for strategic criteria. Three of these closely align with the revisions being made to the Compact code on volunteering :
- 'Raising awareness' can be seen to link closely with 'valuing volunteer contributions'
- 'Spreading good practice' relates to the section on 'improving the volunteering experience'
- 'Removing policy barriers' has synergy with 'removing barriers to volunteering'
We welcome this as clear joined up thinking - and would suggest that this could be reinforced through reference to the revised code within each of these areas.
Proposal to add an additional strategic criterion
We would propose adding a strategic criteria about 'increasing the quantity and quality of volunteering opportunities'. We believe that this is a key part of achieving your vision for volunteering. Including this would, in all likelihood, always maintain a strong link between your strategic criteria and any current PSA, which we believe to be an important inclusion. This could then be fleshed out in your specific priority areas, which we anticipate will change more frequently than your strategic criteria (currently around themes of all volunteers, young people, social exclusion, public sector, mentoring and befriending).
The role of volunteering infrastructure within the strategic criteria
We welcome the acknowledgement of the importance of volunteering infrastructure in your strategic criteria. This has clear resonance with the revisions to Compact code on volunteering and to the work of the ChangeUp strategy.
We also welcome the commitment to investment in volunteering infrastructure, and acknowledge the substantial work that you have undertaken to begin to address this since the publication of the 2002 Cross-cutting review on the role of the voluntary and community sector in public service delivery.
We note your definition of infrastructure, but would like to point out that this refers only to the support volunteering infrastructure offers to the voluntary and community sector. We believe that volunteering infrastructure is distinctive in that it in addition to your defined role it also has a public face and works across all sectors. We suggest that this additional functionality is acknowledged in your strategic criteria. This will also serve to differentiate between explicit infrastructure support for volunteering and generic voluntary and community sector infrastructure services which are the responsibility of other parts of government both within and beyond the Home Office.
Volunteering infrastructure underpins your other three, and our additionally proposed, strategic criteria as well as any PSA relating to volunteering. We believe that this should be explicit within your text.
Are there other ways that potential strategic partners could help us deliver against these criteria?
A key way to support the delivery of all strategic criteria will be through an explicit expectation of the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit that all strategic partners work closely together on activity funded by the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit, therefore adding value to all work and ensuring joined-up thinking and delivery.
Policy barriers
We believe that this is a key area of work undertaken by potential strategic partners, which already offer greater activity than that suggested. In fact it is an identified function of volunteering infrastructure, as described in Building on success and referenced in the Compact code on volunteering .
We would suggest that potential strategic partners could also have a role in legislation watching at a local, regional and national level. This would link to Compact commitments on having volunteer friendly legislative environment.
Although we endorse the role of potential strategic partners in providing 'intelligence' we believe this should be strengthened to having a role in building consensus, both across and beyond government. The intelligence that strategic partners can provide can be substantive and empirical as well as anecdotal, and can be used to help develop strategic thinking - we believe this should be reflected within your examples.
We strongly believe that a key role of a potential strategic partner is to be a 'critical friend', and would strongly recommend the inclusion of this role within the description.
Investing in infrastructure
We believe that potential strategic partners could help you to deliver against strategic criteria because of their cross-sectoral role. There could be substantial advantage to the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit working with strategic partners to get these key messages to a variety of stakeholders in and beyond government.
Given the substantial investment being made by the Active Community Unit in ChangeUp and the proposals to establish and invest in CapacityBuilders, we believe that a further role of potential strategic partners will be in providing linkages on this work.
Do you agree with the proposed approach to selecting strategic partners?
Yes. However, we would suggest that you strengthen your approach through looking at the coverage/reach/footprint in selecting your strategic partners.
Do you agree with the proposed priority areas? Are there other areas which we should include as well as or instead of others?
It is very difficult to say that these are not priority areas, though at the same time it would be very easy to extend this list in substantial ways. It could easily be suggested that support for trustees would be a priority area given current focus on this. Similarly it could be seen that work with volunteers with additional or specific support needs (not only in a health and social care sense, but also in terms of refugees, asylum seekers, community cohesion, ex-offenders, rurality, etc.) would be of specific assistance in achieving PSA 6. Ultimately we acknowledge that priority areas will need to reflect current political imperatives.
Whilst we would not question the importance of mentoring and befriending as an activity, in fact we would strongly advocate for it, we would suggest that it does not have a comfortable fit with your other priority areas. Rather, we think that if your other priority areas are being appropriately met mentoring and befriending will be a form of volunteering available to reach within each of the other four priority areas.
We assume that priority areas will change over time, and therefore think that it is important that strategic partners are selected for an ability to be flexible and responsive to potentially rapidly changing priority areas.
Do you agree that strategic partnership arrangements should last for a minimum of three and a maximum of five years?
The obvious answer to this is 'yes'. However, on reflection, we feel that, if strategic partners are to have arrangements lasting different periods of time, careful consideration needs to be given to the mechanics of this. Specifically we would want to see clear criteria for arrangements that were longer than three years and transparency in the decision-making process. We believe this is important for the credibility of both the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit and the partner organisation. For this reason we would want to see the development of strong monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment within partnership arrangements.
To what extent is it possible to have closer working relationships with strategically funded organisations without compromising independence?
We acknowledge that there is always a tension for both parties where a strategic partner is also bound by a funding agreement. However, we believe that being open about this need not hinder closer working relationships. Some key expressed principles could be contained in a memorandum of understanding:
- Acknowledgement by the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit of the Compact commitment to the independence of the sector, and hence the partner organisation, irrespective of funding relationships with government, balanced by an acknowledgement by the partner organisation of the role of the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit as part of the structure of government, with the rights and responsibilities this brings
- Acknowledgement that the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit and its strategic partner cover shared ground from different perspectives and seek to achieve complementary outcomes - and that whilst this will normally lead to building of consensus and enriching the activity of both, that there could be occasions when there is a difference of opinion about an issue that cannot be reconciled, and that this it can be appropriate to agree to differ
- Acknowledgement by the strategic partner that it needs to have a diverse funding base, and by the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit that it will support the development of this and not penalise an organisation for the results of activity it undertakes to broaden its income streams
We are also aware that the ChangeUp programme has added an additional dimension to the relationship between the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit and its strategically funded partners through the creation of the Volunteering Hub. We believe that there needs to be close operational relationship between the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit, its strategic partners, the Volunteering Hub and the active Community Unit & CapacityBuilders - and that the framework for this will also need to be explicitly developed.
Do you agree with the proposed exclusion criteria? Are there other criteria which we should include as well as or instead of these?
We agree with the three stated exclusions, and would propose that a fourth is added to these - funding not being given for direct public service delivery unless that delivery also supports the Volunteering and Charitable Giving Unit strategic criteria through enabling other organisations to also develop skills/abilities/expertise in the work that is being funded.
