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Voluntary & Community Sector Conference
Thursday 23rd November 2017
Charlton Athletic Football Club – Millennium Suite
Arrival: 9-9:15am
Start: 9:30am
Cabinet Member’s speech: 9:45am
Speech: Cllr. Denise Scott-McDonald
Thank you Denise….and thank you to everyone who has come along today and those who have participated over the past year and beyond in the development of the strategy.
I also want to express my thanks to Ian.
He has been busy meeting representatives from every sector, including the fire, police, faith groups, and liaising with the Leader, the Cabinet, the Chief Executive and Directors across the council to stress the importance of getting this right.
It has been a learning curve for all of us
Learning just how much is going on across the borough and how complex and connected it all is.
And learning what we are tapped into, but also what we aren’t tapped into, particularly in the faith sector.
You will hopefully all have seen the strategy as part of the consultation process – and you will find a copy on your seat.
It identified seven key areas which we will be focusing on :Premises, Funding, Collaborative working, Volunteering, Digital Inclusion and Equality and Inclusion.
[SLIDE WILL CHANGE TO LIST THE 7 PRIORITY AREAS]
Alongside the strategy is also a three year Action Plan, which identifies what actions we need to take to meet the objectives outlined in the strategy.
My focus today is to highlight just a few of the things we are working on to implement these objectives.
Of course, this conference itself is one of the objectives under Collaborative Working – and it is something we plan to hold annually as a means of bringing the sector together, celebrating your work and providing opportunities to network with each other and provide opportunities to share good practice through the presentations and workshops.
We hope that each year, the event will have a different focus – this year we want to focus on one of the key priority areas – Collaboration and Partnership working.
Behind the scenes we have been working hard with our colleagues across the different directorates to ensure that we are better coordinated and working together more closely on the issues that matter to you.
Officers from different directorates will be giving short presentations this afternoon on how their areas of work can benefit your service users – including how to take up the services, feed in to their development or engage with the teams involved.
The Greenwich Partnership – established last year and which meets quarterly is being used as a key platform to raise cross-cutting VCS issues.
And we are also looking more closely at how we better link faith based social action to our wider activity.
Engagement and Co-production is the name of the game and we want to make sure we are doing that more to make sure that we get things right.
To address the many issues a lot of you had about Premises, a few months ago we started mapping council and other public sector buildings more strategically to have a better picture of what is available where and how we can put it all to better use.
At the same time, we are working with our colleagues in our Property Team to write a premises strategy on how we work with organisations in Council owned buildings going forward.
Starting with the community centres, we want to provide them with the security of tenure that so many of them want and need through long-term leases, while also establishing a fairer playing field in terms of looking after those buildings.
This mapping exercise, working closely with our colleagues in Regeneration, and with other public sector partners, aims to inform how we move towards increasing capacity and developing shared space for the sector to use – using public sector buildings more affordably, more flexibly and more creatively.
‘Funding’ is a key issue for everyone we've talked to. It's a challenging time and while we will remain committed to supporting the sector we need to look at additional opportunities and ways of securing other funding to ensure a sustainable future.
We have started a feasibility study on how we might develop a local giving scheme in the borough – and officers are meeting with a broad range of potential stakeholders in December on what one might look like in Greenwich.
We are exploring different approaches to increasing fundraising support – looking at, for example, how an External Funding Officer could help us lever external funding into the borough, and broker potential partnerships and collaboration between organisations.
GAVS and METRO have recently merged to form METRO GAVS. Naomi will tell you more about that next, but what this merger does is increase some capacity for developing consortium bids.
We hope that next year, we will see some more funding bids coming through them and that these reach more of you.
Many of you in receipt of council funding will be relieved that we have started to review the way we do our monitoring, and we hope to introduce that in at least a couple of areas in time for next year’s grants.
This theme also overlaps with a number of objectives under Business Engagement .
For our Local Giving Scheme to be successful, we need engagement and buy-in from members of the business community and that is something we will be actively working towards.
Using a local giving scheme as a platform, and potentially a digital platform as well, we do anticipate that by next year there will be lots more communication between the borough’s business and voluntary sectors.
This will provide opportunities to develop mutually beneficial relationships for businesses and the VCS through corporate social responsibility – for example through increased volunteering opportunities for staff, greater fundraising, perhaps sponsorship, or in-kind support, like providing a bit of pro-bono time or expertise for a local organisation.
On Digital Inclusion, METRO GAVS and the West London based organisation Superhighways are collaborating on how they can secure some joint funding for improving Digital Capacity building in the borough.
We are also looking to do some research into levels of digital exclusion in the borough so we can better map the needs of both residents and the voluntary sector.
We know that organisations often lack the capacity to develop their own digital skills – and many residents lack the skills or equipment to access information and services.
Identifying and addressing digital exclusion ties in with a wide range of Council priorities, including the anti-poverty strategy; Universal Credit full roll-out, volunteering and business engagement – and we are taking steps to cut across all these issues in the different objectives.
On Volunteering, we know that there are already many thousands of volunteers in the borough who are working tirelessly as school governors, support workers, mentors, trustees, befrienders and a whole host of other roles.
However, the messages we heard from many of you were that we need to better coordinate our supply and demand, and sometimes this just means better communication.
We’ve established a new Volunteer Communication Group which will meet in early December to develop a strategy and some themed campaigns. These will coordinate the messages about volunteering available in the borough and find ways to highlight opportunities and celebrate people’s volunteering commitments.
We’re also supporting Volunteer Centre Greenwich to celebrate our home grown volunteers at an event during Volunteers Week 2018.
If you want to get involved or find out more, just talk to Michelle Martin during the day and I’m sure she’ll be pleased to fill you in or register your support.
Around the Equalities and Inclusion theme, we also are taking this opportunity to work more closely with the Faith sector – and a presentation and workshop today will highlight some of those existing activities.
We are looking at ways to improve collaboration between information and advice providers (both funded and unfunded). This is such a key factor that we all need to work on to meet the recommendations from our Fairness Commission, our Anti-Poverty Strategy and the current challenges facing the council in terms of Universal Credit.
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The strategy has been formally adopted by the Cabinet, and We will be monitoring the implementation and delivery of the Action Plan to ensure we keep on track.
I now want to hand over to Naomi Goldberg – who is making her debut here at the conference as the new Director of Strategy at METRO.
She will tell you a bit more about the status of the sector here in Greenwich and some of you will have the chance to hear from her again later today in the workshop she is leading on Governance.
Thanks very much – Over to you Naomi.