GOOD NEWS! – West Sussex localises CVS and Volunteer Centre support

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Pic of clapping hands by Wowovr2 / wikimedia commonsBucking the trend towards mergers, acquisitions and single contracts to corporate predators, positive news is coming in from West Sussex, where fresh agreements between the local authorities and the County’s seven CVSs explicitly recognise the importance of locally accountable provision.

Several years ago, the County was a focus of an NCIA study into the effects … Continue reading

‘Outsourcing and Austerity’ – conference report now available

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Back in October, 150 lively people participated in our conference on ‘Outsourcing and Austerity: Civil Society and the Coalition Government’. The conference, organised by NCIA and the TUC with Unison, Unite and NAVCA, provided an opportunity to examine the damaging effects of government policy and ways in which activists, trades unionists, and voluntary sector groups … Continue reading

Put up or shut up: the New Year dilemma for voluntary services

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NCIAOne of the strongest features of 2012 was the obvious drift of the voluntary services sector towards a government-inspired vision of contracted and sub-contracted welfare providers, modelled on private business styles and practices, or shoehorned into ‘social enterprise’. And with this has come a deafening silence in speaking out against the privation and injustice being … Continue reading

Anger grows as ‘sector leaders’ ingratiate themselves with the government – sign the letter ‘not in our name’

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Sign the letter below and add your name to the growing discontent.

In a letter to Sajid Javid, economic secretary to the treasury, fourteen “leaders from the voluntary sector” have told the government that the sector “stands ready” to implement government plans to privatise public services, cut benefits and entitlements and encourage volunteering as a … Continue reading

What the Lottery has got in mind for us all

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The Big Lottery Fund has been progressively extending its influence over the pattern of local voluntary sector activity, using its funding clout to shift assumptions and reshape the way the sector operates. Here in this new paper, ‘Building Capabilities: BIG’s map of our future’ Adrian Barritt from Adur Voluntary Action casts a critical eye … Continue reading

Here We Stand – an Inquiry into Activism & Dissent

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Over the summer and early autumn of 2012, Penny Waterhouse from NCIA gathered information about activism springing up locally and about the different models of radical support for this action. Read here. The results are encouraging: Active Dissent is alive and well, and sometimes works!

The Inquiry threw up a number of questions:

Where … Continue reading

From co-operation to competition and fragmentation

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Listen to us cartoonThe experience of neighbourhood youth projects in Newcastle – In our latest story about commissioning, Michael Bell from the Patchwork Project in Newcastle describes the experience of local groups bidding against the big boy Barnardo’s..

Co-operating

Several years ago nine neighbourhood-based projects from acrossNewcastlestarted to meet in order to find ways of working better together, … Continue reading