A couple of international (English speaking) voluntary sector developments:

From The Malta Independent: Enactment of legislation to strengthen the voluntary sector - “The National Council of Women welcomed the Voluntary Organisations Act, passed by the House of Representatives on 24 September.” This item is rather truncated and doesn’t explain much but it appears that a Commissioner will be established and voluntary work supported.

From Scoop, New Zealand: The New Zealand Federation of Voluntary Welfare Organisations and New Zealand Council of Social Services are delighted to see that the Community & Voluntary Sector portfolio has been promoted to Cabinet level (in the government).

Radio 4’s new series of ‘Analysis’ kicked off yesterday evening with a programme called Changing Charities where Professor Alison Wolf of King’s College London asked: “Have we found a third way which offers the best of both public and private? Or just created a threat to charities’ treasured ability to speak truth to power?” Or as it concludes, in the search for the holy grail, will the knight slay charities on the way?

It’s on ‘Listen again’ presumably for the usual week, and the half hour is packed with interviews with prominent sector names, from a variety of perspectives.

Thanks to Karl Wilding for his post to VSSN list.

Ed Miliband, Minister for the Third Sector, this week gave a lecture to NCVO in memory of Nicholas Hinton. He is very keen to hear sector comments.

The lecture, ‘Changing lives, changing society’, explores the appropriate roles of the government and third sector, and argues against an “isolationist” model that sees either sector as able to provide social justice alone. He also argues that one of the greatest ways the sector contributes to society is not just through individual acts, or even changes to individual laws or policies, but by shifting the ethos of the country: when a campaign on one issue wins recognition of a principle, it opens up space for new campaigns and further change.

You can read the talk at the OTS/Cabinet Office web site, under speeches, http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/third_sector/speeches/.

Post your comments here and we’ll make sure they get passed on.

It’s not as though there aren’t probably too many charity networks or support bodies out there already, but on OpenCharityBlog I’ve followed up a comment on The Observer’s pages asking about a network for kitchen table heroines’. Cristina Odone highlights in a short piece today the work done ‘around the kitchen table’ by very small charities.

See OpenCharityBlog for the link and if you want to comment further. Does bring to mind that Bleak House figure neglecting her own offspring in favour of the poor dears in Africa, but I’m sure none of the ventures Cristina mentions falls into that trap!

I seem to be almost agreeing with the opinion pieces emanating from Luke FitzHerbert at Directory of Social Change these days, unlike when I worked alongside him there.

In this week’s Third Sector, he asks how the sector can justify its tax breaks, when “too often” charities operate like businesses prepared to do anything to earn money and preserve jobs. His jumping off point is a local homecare business run by a cousin.

I could have given him more background on these issues 10 years or so ago, in relation to the mental health/learning disabilities residential care charity I’d worked for immediately before joining DSC. And actually contracting services to charities was quite a big thing back in the early 90s, with DSC even running courses and publishing books on how to manage contract finances. So as so often with sector ‘developments’, nothing really new here
Where Luke is perhaps being a bit naive is in saying that as trustees aren’t paid, they have no personal interest at stake and so can defy commercial pressures if these are at odds with charitable aims. One reason I was so desperate to jump ship from the residential care charity was the push from nearly all the trustees to expand, supposedly to secure the charity’s future but without much regard to the quality of the services it was set up to provide originally. I assumed that this was becuase they derived prestige from being seen in charge of a ’succesful’ charity but I never had the opportunity to find out for sure.

Here’s the start of an interesting post on YouthNet’s blog (4th May):

“Should the local volunteering infrastructure be funded by national government?

“On a day when turnout in local elections is expected to be below 40%, volunteering provides a good illustration of the tensions between national and local.

“On the one hand, national government wants to utilise volunteering to meet their policy goals on everything from crime reduction to youth inclusion. They’re prepared to put money in, but direct funding of the local volunteering infrastructure (Volunteer Centres) is off-limits. That, through custom rather than any set rules, is funded by local government.”

And the post ends:
“It would take a brave government to reduce funding for things like volunteering in order to force them up the local political agenda. And it’s not something that national volunteering organisations, who themselves benefit from centralisation, are ever likely to advocate.”

For the rest, see YouthNet blog: youth issues, volunteering, charity life and technology.

Skimming the current (April) issue of NCVO’s Voluntary Sector magazine, which has a focus on Campaigning, I was intrigued by a quote: “Many people forget that campaigning is a relatively new discipline. We need to foster credibility and legitimacy.”

This is from Chris Stalker, who is to head up NCVO’s new Campaigning Effectiveness Programme, launching in May. My immediate reaction was a thought that the Chartist Movement, trade unions, anti-slavery campaigns and more date back to early 19th Century if not before. But maybe I need a better understanding of what a ‘discipline’ is in this context - perhaps it means a professional career option?

Having been involved in a variety of campaigns in my time, I can’t say I look forward to the passion and excitement of volunteer-led campaigns being sanitised by respectability from a “10 week certificated course” and other developments. But perhaps I’m just showing my age (not quite an ageing hippy).

The branding survey being run for the new youth volunteering charity following on from the Russell Commision is clearly after under 25s, and doesn’t warrant a mention on VoluntaryNews. But some readers may be interested in the weird and wonderful questions.

I gave up at the first page of ‘real’ questions, asking views on ‘words’ like saint, V., inc., mustard. Some on the volunteering professionals list UKVPM got a bit further before deciding it was too abstract for them (and wondering if they were in the wrong business!)
See the Flash intro or go direct to the survey.

More comment on the launch event for the national hubs of expertise (Brum, 28th March), roughly in ‘order of appearance’. (Note to Lizzie - I’ll find a news item in here somewhere, I promise.)

Firstly, it was good to be reminded by Chris Pond, the chair of the new CapacityBuilders body, that all ChangeUp funding will go through them in future, rather than the present disjointed affair where the national hubs get dealt with at one level, while regional/local sector infrastructure projects go via Regional Offices with varying understanding, capability and priorities in managing the process. On the other hand it was disappointing that CapacityBuilders itself is having its own launch in the same venue in a few days time, so that Chris couldn’t say anything new here.

Back on Finance Hub, somehow I had missed that this was even further delayed in development than the ICT Hub. It seems unlikely that contracts for work (mainly research) that were only sorted last week can deliver quality results in just 3 months. Most of the sector doesn’t work at that speed, however much certain ‘voices’ for the sector claim, unless it is an absolutely crucial issue.

One quote of note from the governance session (not word for word) “a step change in trustee diversity is needed”, in contrast to most of the other good governance issues.

And from NCVO boss Stuart Etherington’s winding up (or perhaps winding down, as there were some drooping heads): “In part, this (Hubs) programme is devised to re-engineer aspects of the (sector) infrastructure” - a deliberate strategy from NCVO, and that it is crucial that there is a better relationship between national, regional and local ‘capacity’ (we presume he means capacity building organisations, such as NCVO, regional forums and local CVS). These comments were interesting partly because this event was aimed at frontline organisations rather than infrastructure bodies, as supposedly the latter had already been involved and informed. But the many Council of Voluntary Service and other ‘LIOs’ present somewhat undermined that statement.

Yesterday’s Hubs Launch Event in Birmingham was interesting as much for the private conversations as the public messages. A wide variety of frustration and anger came my way from a range of people I spoke to, from concerns from sector suppliers that their business model was being undermined by public funds, to what I guess was annoyance that the brochure invite to “Find out how you can run your organisation more effectively” bore little relation to an event that was more an update and request for views on what the hubs are planning to do. And plenty of comment on wasted money both nationally and in the ’sub-regional consortia’, although some appeared based on inaccurate information.
The event got off to a bad start for me by the ICT Hub stand offering a free mouse mat, while the others were all providing information. Hardly an encouraging indicator of direction, but perhaps that was because today sees the separate ICT Hub launch event in London.

Enough of the negative. I was impressed by the comprehensive thought and prepation evident in the Governance hub workshop, even if my neighbour reckoned his organisation had already done everything they suggested.

And it was encouraging to learn that the Finance Hub, which had previously seemed to be purely focused on funding issues, was aiming to put resources into supporting existing funding advice networks and develop a community accountancy network. As another participant said, successful funding is also about strategic planning, financial management, monitoring and reporting. A slight shame that this has meant income generation issues are on the back-burner but getting the basics sorted before the ’sexy’ has got to be right.

Speaking of which, I heard that the word ‘hubber’, which could be a description of someone involved in hubs, means condom in Australia. Anyone want to confirm or deny?

For those not in the know, the 6 national hubs of expertise are: finance, ICT, performance, governance, volunteering and workforce development. See Professional Bodies page on VolResource.

A few key quotes to come in another blog post.

[tags]hubs of expertise, infrastructure, finance, governance, ICT[/tags]