The VCSE sector has a significant role to play in prevention and maintaining the health and well-being of its communities but needs support to achieve this, our Commissioned VCSE support and Development provider, The Smile Foundation, not only support and develop our local VCSE groups but also seek to release legacy and trust funding to provide financial support to them, and individual’s, in our East Riding Community. For more examples of the great work being achieved visit the East Riding Health & Wellbeing website.
VCSE (Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise) overview
The VCSE and community groups in the East Riding is large, with a wide range of organisations from small, independent social and community groups to larger and national organisations with greater resources and infra structure. They have individual aims and goals; some are focused on geographical areas or communities or cohorts. They have many different legal structures, financial and governance arrangements and some are run solely by volunteers whilst others employ staff. Some are funded through contracts and grants, some through donations and other forms of giving, whilst others operate solely on the time and expertise of their volunteers and local fund raising or income generated by services. In this context, the support and development needs of the VCSE and communities’ groups operating in the East Riding are diverse and complex.
The key principles of the VCSE are:
- Promote collaboration
- Use local data, intelligence and evidence to develop local services, assets and places with local residents and organisations that promote community ownership, leadership, and involvement
- Use data and local evidence to support better decisions, improve efficiency and reduce inequalities.
- Encourage sustainability, efficiency and use of resources
- Actively engage and involve communities
- Promote an equal and fair East Riding
Smile continue to work with the VCSE, other statutory agencies and the Council in continuing to build community assets and service in response to the Council’s priority of empowering and supporting communities and developments in the Integrated Care Board. In addition to the local community support, developments and services like the Crown building, together for Goole and the recently launched grant programme Smile continue to look at developments that can provide all members of the VCSE community with more strategic tools that will enable them to have the systems, influence and representation to be at the forefront of developing collaborative solutions for our residents and communities. Some of the projects currently in development are:
- VCSE non-executive board;
- Developing an I.T. system that will enable services to be commissioned at the hyper local level;
- Using complex adaptive mapping of the VCSE services and groups to provide detailed information on which to base decision and identify critical connections.
- Time to Volunteer (T2V) free resource to support volunteers and volunteering
- A dedicated VCSE digital training platform bringing together training packages and making it easier for VCSE to access and identify training requirements
- These will assist in ensuring the VCSE community are in a very strong position to seize opportunities as they arise and evidence their impact across communities and the wider system.
In the future, we would like to continue to encourage development within the VCSE sector; encouraging more VCSE organisations to play their part in the VCSE programme and develop a VCSE sector which shows both creativity and resilience in engaging the local community to create an equal and fair East Riding.
