Voluntary and Community Sector Involvement
Seminar - booking form and details below:
Strategic Commissioning and the Voluntary and Community Sector Seminar
18th March 2010,
Leicester Tigers, Aylestone Road Leiceter
The city’s voluntary and community sector (VCS) has a unique focus on working closely with communities in the city. So it’s important that the Leicester Partnership works with the VCS to maximise knowledge of local communities, skills in collaboration, and the potential to be partners in commissioning and in delivering solutions, programmes and services to help us all work together to tackle the challenges we face in the city.
In 2009 Leicester Partnership increased the number of seats for VCS representatives to 25. These places are divided into 14 for communities of interest representatives and 11 for neighbourhood representatives.
VCS communities of interest
The partnership has places for two representatives from each of seven communities of interest. We provide support to representatives from the Leicester Partnership Team and Voluntary Action Leicester. But the partnership also wants to help representatives to engage with the VCS groups they represent, so in the last year Philip Parkinson, the Chair of the Leicester Partnership has been working with a small task group to raise awareness of the partnership and its work in the VCS, and get the VCS themselves to choose ‘host organisations’ from the sector who will work on developing infrastructure and supporting the representatives.
Following ballots of VCS groups – the following host organisations have been selected -
The first job of the hosts will now be to identify the two representatives for their community of interest – and these representatives will be invited to the Leicester Partnership AGM meeting on 30th September.
VCS neighbourhood representatives
The Partnership also decided to allocate 11 places for VCS neighbourhood representatives, based on pairing up the 22 wards in the city into 11 pairs. The representatives will work with the ward community meetings in their area, and as with the VCS communities of interest places, the partnership wanted the VCS themselves to be involved in choosing the representatives.
To do this, a series of 11 meetings will be held for VCS groups whose work focuses in each of the areas to talk about the work of the partnership and to set up the process of selecting the representatives. Voluntary Action Leicester is working with the partnership team to carry out this work and will have a key role in supporting the representatives.
The role of VCS representatives on the Leicester Partnership
Find out more about being a representative. This document tells you why it is important that the VCS should be involved in the work of the partnership and what the benefits are. It also sets out what the role of representatives is and what is expected of them, plus what support representatives will get to help them in that role.
Contact
VCS communities of interest representatives
Carine Cardoza
Leicester Partnership Team
0116 252 6719
carine.cardoza@leicester.gov.uk
VCS neighbourhood representatives
Carine Cardoza
Leicester Partnership Team
0116 252 6778
carine.cardoza@leicester.gov.uk
