London Regional ICT Champion

Capacitybuilders today announced details of the lead organisations it will be working with over the next three years to strengthen third sector support services for the benefit of diverse frontline organisations across England.

A total of £11 million has been awarded across seven priority workstreams. The successful lead organisations are all supported in their bids by partnerships with a range of organisations from across the wider Third Sector.

The seven workstreams that have been awarded are as follows:

• Campaigning and Advocacy will be led by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations
• Equalities and Diversity will be led by the Women’s Resource Centre
• Income Generation will be led by the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations
• Leadership and Governance will be led by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations
• Marketing and Communications will be led by the Media Trust
• Modernising Volunteering will be led by Volunteering England
• Performance Management will be led by Charities Evaluation Services

The announcement went added, “The Grants Committee decided not to appoint lead providers for the Collaboration and Responding to Social Change workstreams.”

Folks who’ve been following this debate for longer than is healthy will remember that  the first draft of National Support Services originally placed ICT in the ‘social change’ workstream.   ICT, along with workforce has since been shunted into a new programme called Learning and Innovation – for which we await details.

The biggest losers in this announcement would appear to be  NCVO, which was awarded just 2 of the 7 workstreams.  Although NAVCA has not emerged as a lead in any of the announced workstreams, we hear they’ve partnered up with at least one of the new workstream leads.

However, it was always likely that new players such as ACEVO and CES would emerge to lead the new workstreams, and this is an opportunity for us to take our agenda to them.

Cynics will also be entitled to ask if the new Capacitybuilders workstreams will be subjected to the same level of scrutiny and criticism as the out-going ChangeUp hubs were.

Either way, the emergence of new players onto the national support services stage means that the relationships with the current hubs and their delivery partners that we’ve all spent 3 years building up – will now be torn down.  So some innevitable re-inventing of wheels will be going on.

Lastly, congratulations to Nicole and all at Womens’ Resource Centre for getting the Equalities and Diversity workstream.  ICT and equalities is already written into the draft London ICT strategy, so hopefully this now means we can work together on delivering practical resources.

Declaration: In the interests of transparency, the London ICT Champion is funded by Capacity Builders and is based at Lasa, a delivery partner of the ICT Hub – which is also funded by Capacity Builders.