Minister wants to hear from you.
Visit the Smart Solutions in Tough Times campaign homepage
Alex Attwood, Minister for Social Development, recently contacted some community and voluntary organisations asking three key questions relating to the budget. The Minister wants to hear from the sector ahead of the upcoming budget negiotations. The full text is below but the key things Minister Attwood wants to know are:
1. What should be the priority areas within DSD to best protect those in need, stress or disadvantage?
2. What works best and what should be reviewed? What could or should be done within the voluntary and community sector to work better to address overheads and deliver greater benefits to the community?
3. Do you have any wider comments about how the Executive should address the budgetary situation?
Groups are free to reply to the Minister directly of course but here in NICVA we are keen to hear what you have to say to inform our own response. We have called a meeting on Monday 23 at 4.00 for those of you who are free to attend - confirm with colm.burns@nicva.org Or you can post your thoughts here and we can discuss them.
There is also an opportunity for you to hear directly from the Minister at our Smart Solutions in Tough Times seminar on 6 September at 2.30. The full agenda is here. I've just checked in with Colm and there are nearly 60 place booked already so if you want to come along you should get your name down as soon as possible.
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Dear Colleague
As Minister for Social Development, I am committed to protecting and empowering the vulnerable and those experiencing poverty and alienation. I recognise that this can only be achieved with the cooperation and hard work of many parties. As the lead Minister for the voluntary and community sector, I thank the thousands of voluntary and community organisations throughout Northern Ireland who identify and respond to need on a daily basis.
We all know that future public spending will be under extreme pressure in both the short and longer term. The protection of front line services and vulnerable people will demand resolve and creativity.
Ahead of budget 2010 discussions in the Executive in early September and in the weeks thereafter, I am asking for your views on how, during these tough economic times, we might protect the vulnerable, preserve the best of voluntary and community action and create the space to grow and test new ideas.
I invite you to consider three questions and respond to these in a way that best suits you:
Question 1
What should be the priority areas within DSD to best protect those in need, stress or disadvantage? What works best and what should be reviewed?
Question 2
What could or should be done within the voluntary and community sector to work better to address overheads and deliver greater benefits to the community?
Question 3
Do you have any wider comments about how the Executive should address the budgetary situation?
You can e-mail your response to the Voluntary and Community Unit at vcu@dsdni.gov.uk or send them to Maeve Walls, Director of the Unit to arrive on or before August 25th 2010. In the interests of collating responses quickly, please confine your comments to 2/3 sides of A4.
Having had an opportunity to consider the responses, I intend to convene a group for further discussion on priorities and options for delivering results. I am confident that practical and substantive ideas will emerge and I look forward to working closely with the sector to help alleviate the worst impact of the recession on vulnerable people.
Please feel free to distribute this letter to other groups or people who you believe would have an interest and input.
Comments
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Mon, 16/08/2010 - 13:23
As a Home-Start scheme who has benefited from Children's Fund monies we are gravely concerned about the cuts to this funding. We support very vulnerable families who without our support would cost the Executive much much more. We prevent family breakdown, prevent an escalation of depression, ill health and child protection cases to name but a few.
When we recently surveyed our referring agents and asked 'to whom they would refer these families if Home-Start was not available', their answers were.....there is no one else .....Social services ....or if from an approiate area Sure Start. However Sure Start does not cover all areas, therefore the additional support needed for these familes would have to be via health and social services and at a much higher cost to the Executive.
Home-Start is a proven volunteer charity, making hugh differences to family life accross Northern Ireland, both in health of parents and children, and ensuring that children have the best possible start in life.I would be seriously concerned if any funding to Home-Start was not continued or cut. I know that it would have serious cost implications and increased workload implications for out Health Visiting and Social Services collegues.
We have proven that Home-Start is a cost effective way of providing vulnerable familes with much needed support as well as enabling people to give of their time, knowledge and skills to help those less able.People supporting people!
If we do not have funding, not only do families not have an important lifeline to help them on the road to recovery, but we also loose the expertise of a wealth of volunteers who have so much to offer in order to make a difference to family life.
I leave you with a quote from one of our referrers .."Home-Start offers an invaluable service to all families who are referred in terms of emotional support, practical support and advice, and reduction in isolation. Mothers value and look forward to visits from the Home-Start volunteer. Home-Start also is an invaluable support to Health Visitors.”
Mon, 16/08/2010 - 16:40
Ruth - I totally agree that Home-Start is doing amazing things. In fact we have featured you as an example of how voluntary and community organisations can be the solution to the tough finanical times we are in. You can read it here. http://www.nicva.org/news/working-families-provide-smart-solutions-tough...
Home-Start is a perfect example of dealing with issues in a timely and cost effective way rather than letting them build up into something much more expensive and ultimately, more damaging. To me this is common sense as well as financial sense!
Mon, 16/08/2010 - 15:17
Our natural environment keeps us alive and for that reason we must protect it and the wildlife it supports. Some of the benefits to us are obvious. It provides our community with food, drinking water, timber, and fuel. It also provides us with places to spend our free time, outdoor classrooms for school children, tourism opportunities, cultural heritage and inspiration. The physical and health benefits of nature are now well established. With physical inactivity costing the UK economy £8 billion annually, using the countryside as a ‘green gym’ would reduce the burden on the taxpayer significantly. Giving children the opportunity to spend time in and learn about the countryside could improve society by reducing aggressive behaviour and improving social skills.
Some of the benefits we get are less obvious, but vitally important. For example, the peat bogs in our uplands store massive amounts of carbon and act as giant sponges to store water, avoiding flooding in towns and villages in the lowlands. They also purify our water, removing discoloration and nasty bacteria like cryptosporidium that cost millions to remove through water treatment. Natural floodplains can also store water at times when rainfall is high and rivers burst their banks. Insects like bees pollinate many of our crops. The list is endless. A recent UN and EU-sponsored report entitled ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’ has estimated that if we continue to damage and destroy natural habitats, the cost to the global community will be $14 trillion a year, around 7% of global GDP. Northern Ireland will not escape these costs, so why does the Executive continue to severely cut funding for the protection of natural habitats that provide these free yet essential services to our community?
The voluntary sector plays a massive role in protecting our natural environment yet faces seriously damaging cuts if grant aid continues to be slashed. Removing funding from environmental groups reduces the sustainability of our future and that of nature and means that substantial co-funding, knowledge and expertise is also lost to our community. Whilst the RSPB accepts that savings must be made across the Executive, it is essential that we fight to save those funds without which our natural environment could be irreparably damaged.
Mon, 16/08/2010 - 16:40
Thanks for those important points James. They remind us all of the breath and depth of the sector and its contribution to the very fabric of our lives here. I blogged a bit on another thread about the need for all the diverse elements of the sector to have each others backs as things move forward. (http://www.nicva.org/blog/debate-budget-cuts-gets-underway#comment-91)
The key to this will be our ability to tell our story and remind people what we do - collectively as a sector and individually as organisations. The sector is full of inspiring people quietly getting on with work on issues that really change things for the better. But I think the time for quiet is over. We need to confidently state our case - just like James has done. It’s not about shouting the loudest or being protectionist - that will do more harm than good. Its about the sector articulating our worth and reminding decision makers to guard against making the wrong choices and make a bad situation worse.
We have been highlighting case studies of how voluntary and community organisations offer the smart solutions for tough times - see the link in my post above.
I would love to add RSPB to the list. If you are interested you can drop me a line at lisa.mcelherron@nicva.org
Thu, 19/08/2010 - 10:21
Question 1
What should be the priority areas within DSD to best protect those in need, stress or disadvantage? What works best and what should be reviewed?
Voluntary Arts Ireland feels able to comment specifically on the Urban Regeneration strand of DSD’s work.
In particular programmes such as Neighbourhood Renewal would be worth prioritising as they focus more on local community engagement, leading to locally-led solutions.
We feel in these times there should be more of a focus on developing peoples’ capacities to help themselves and become more engaged in civil society. This leads to programmes that address community leadership, social entrepeneurship, creative thinking, innovation, working in partnership and many more ‘softer’ areas. So perhaps a rebalancing away from the physical regeneration as in particular capital expenditure is being severely hit.
We feel there is a need to develop connections and share learning between neighbourhood renewal areas to maximise the benefits of this approach. There is also a need to connect more effectively the grass roots organisations in communities to statutory bodies – to enable better communication between sectors that essentially speak different languages. This should lead to delivery mechanisms which are more fit for purpose.
Question 2
What could or should be done within the voluntary and community sector to work better to address overheads and deliver greater benefits to the community?
The sustainability of organisations/services/facilities is of paramount concern. Voluntary Arts Groups are a very interesting model in that on the whole they are self-sustaining because members pay for services and they are generally speaking run voluntarily – so with that structure greater benefit is delivered by having more groups.
Of course that model does not transfer when we are talking about broader services that require core professional staff - but it is interesting to think that we do not always have to go towards larger delivery structures to deliver efficiencies. Perhaps smaller more networked groups which share learning, resources and skills can be more flexible and responsive in their approach – delivering within their own capacity and combining with others to expand capacity when needed. It would also help to encourage more volunteering – as long as that was not seen as a way to replace required professional staff.
Question 3
Do you have any wider comments about how the Executive should address the budgetary situation?
Voluntary Arts Ireland would encourage the Executive to set priorities based on what in their judgement will deliver a better Northern Ireland and not to try to just maintain a smaller version of what we already have. It is time to make very strategic investments and to be brave.
We would encourage the Executive to articulate other expressions of value other than money, e.g social capital. There is a great danger that to focus only on the pounds, shillings and pence version of value that you will end up with more of what you don’t want even though it cost you less to get it.
The focus on collaborative working and engaging local communities in helping the Executive is to be welcomed. There seems to be an opportunity to refocus the role of government departments to being more of a facilitator of community action rather than a director of it – it maybe that departments already want to be that but perhaps the way in which they are structured does not allow that approach to blossom.
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