This afternoon I have been at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills for a meeting of what was the Learning Revolution Festival Action Group. Now that the October festival is finished this group is going to continue as a Learning Revolution stakeholder communications group to advise on the vision and direction of strategic Learning Revolution communications activity and to plan major communications activities, including an Expo or similar for 2010.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: DCMS, England, funding, heritage, ncvo, olympics, OTS, vcs, volarts
On Thursday I was in London for my regular meeting with Heritage Link and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. We were joined by Chris Atkins, Head of Lottery Distribution and Third Sector Policy at DCMS and had a wide ranging discussion about the voluntary cultural sectors. Among many other topics we discussed the progress of the sector coalition on Gift Aid, the Office of the Third Sector’s withdrawal of its Campaigning Fund and Heritage Link’s Cultural Olympiad project, ‘Discovering Places’, which has been awarded £1M from the Olympic Lottery Distributor.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: arts, education, England, training, volarts
On Wednesday afternoon I took part in the first meeting of a new strategic advisory group for an informal adult learning research project being run by NIACE (the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education) on behalf of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. This research project is mapping training and development opportunities for facilitators of informal adult learning. This includes those who consider themselves ‘tutors’ but also a wide range of other people who encourage, organise and inspire informal learning (eg sports coaches, conductors of amateur choirs etc). We had fascinating discussions about how to give people the skills necessary to do this kind of facilitation (which was the subject of our recent ‘Taste for Tutoring’ seminars) and the difficulties of trying to identify standards, training or accreditation that could apply across the whole spectrum of informal adult learning.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: England, Europe, funding, volarts, volunteering
On Wednesday I was back in London to attend the England Volunteering Development Council meeting where we heard from Markus Held, Director of the European Volunteer Centre about plans for the European Year of Volunteering 2011. The European Commission agreed, in June this year, to designate 2011 as the European Year of Volunteering and it is now awaiting approval from the 27 national ministers on 27 November. The aim is “to get Europe talking about volunteers for a whole year”. Assuming it goes ahead, one effect will be that for the next two years existing EU funding programmes will give priority to applications relating to volunteering. More details at http://www.eyv2011.eu.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: England, funding, politics, research, vcs, volarts
On Monday afternoon I met Matthew Scott, Director of the Community Sector Coalition to discuss a number of policy themes that might form part of the Coalition’s new strategic plan. We talked about the likely impact of a Conservative Government on the community sector: Shadow Third Sector Minister, Nick Hurd, is to address the next meeting of the Community Sector Coalition in December. We agreed on the importance of small grant schemes as seed-bed development for community groups. Matthew described the community sector as an ‘iceberg’: only a fraction of the sector is clearly visible – there are massive numbers of informal, un-constituted community groups which it is nearly impossible to map. We also discussed the Voluntary Sector Compact and its relevance to small community groups. Finally, we looked at the issues of climate change and sustainability and the extent to which the arts might be used to explore the climate change message.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: volarts, funding, politics, DCMS, England, vcs, ace, arts, heritage
On Monday I was in London for a meeting with Heritage Link and the Central Council for Physical Recreation to discuss the Conservative Party’s proposals to change the distribution of National Lottery funds. A Conservative Government would increase the proportion of Lottery money distributed by Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Sport England by reducing the proportion currently channelled through the Big Lottery Fund. The intention is that this redistribution would cut grants to statutory bodies by the Big Lottery Fund without reducing funding to the voluntary and community sector, though it may be difficult to achieve this so neatly in practice. We were keen to stress that a significant number of voluntary and community sector organisations currently secure Lottery funding through the arts, heritage and sport distributors – and could therefore potentially benefit from the proposed changes. (Indeed the vast majority of arts, heritage and sport Lottery funding goes to third sector organisations.) We also discussed the implications of last week’s announcement by the Shadow Culture Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, that a Conservative Government would seek to merge English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Robin Simpson.
On Tuesday afternoon I was at the Community Media Association in Sheffield for the first meeting of the CMA Arts Project Steering Group. CMA Arts Co-ordinator, Tamar Millen, updated us on her progress to date and we discussed her first draft of the new CMA Arts Strategy. I agreed to set up a meeting for Tamar with a range of voluntary arts umbrella bodies to start to discuss how voluntary arts groups and community media organisations might collaborate.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: volarts, funding, education, youth, England, vcs, ace, training
On Tuesday I was in Sheffield to visit the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action. NAVCA is the national umbrella body for local third sector infrastructure in England and represents 344 local councils for voluntary service and similar organisations. In a series of quick one-to-one meetings (that felt a bit like speed dating!) I talked to a range of NAVCA staff, got a good overview of the work of the organisation and identified a number of areas in which we might be able to work together. I discussed with NAVCA Chief Executive, Kevin Curley, the role NAVCA members could play in the model for local delivery of capacity-building for voluntary arts groups that we are currently working on with the Arts Council England Amateur Arts Partnership Development Programme steering group. Carrie McKenzie, NAVCA’s Sport Partnership Adviser, told me about the work she has been doing (funded by Sport England) to embed a culture of collaboration between sport and the wider third sector and we discussed how we might develop a similar approach in relation to the voluntary arts. Every Child Matters Adviser, Angela Barnes, explained the work NAVCA is doing (funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families) to support young people, disabled children and the extended schools programme. I talked to Barney Mynott, Policy & Communications Manager, about how we might work together on advocacy and information services. Helen Oparinde told me about NAVCA’s SKILD project (Skills and Knowledge for Local Development) which provides training for development workers supporting front line third sector organisations. Finally I met Terry Perkins, Public Law Training Officer, who explained how the Public Law Project is allowing third sector organisations to influence decisions made by public bodies. It was a very interesting day and I came away determined to encourage voluntary arts groups to make more use of the wide range of (often free) services available through local Councils for Voluntary Service: to find your nearest CVS go to: http://webdb.navca.org.uk. Many thanks to Kevin, Carrie and everyone at NAVCA.
Robin Simpson.
On Wednesday I was at the Greater Manchester Centre for Voluntary Organisations in Manchester for the second meeting of the NCVO Members’ Assembly. It was good to see NCVO continuing to use a creative approach to the assembly meetings: the format again gave us good opportunities to interact with most of the other people in the room and incubated some innovative ideas on ‘the good society’. As part of the development of NCVO’s civil society agenda, and the NCVO Manifesto for the general election, we considered the questions: “what is the good society?”; “how do voluntary and community organisations help to create the good society”; and “what will we need from the next government to achieve it?”. I worried, at first, that this might lead to an unrealistic utopian discussion but as we worked through the exercises some very clear ideas emerged. It was a really interesting and thought-provoking day.
Robin Simpson.
