London Region ICT Champion

Capacity Builders has announced details of successful bidders into its Improving Reach Programme.  A total of £17,444,123 was awarded across the 9 English regions.

So far, the only details we have are those published by Capacity Builders, which shows a total of  10 grants totalling £2,374,550 (13.6% of the total) awarded to London.  Until we get further information from Capacity Builders, its not clear of any if the winning projects will feature elements of ICT.

Improving Reach awards 2008: London

• Evelyn Oldfield Unit £375,000 (supports refugee organisations)

• London Community Recycling Network £139,683

• Olmec £370,998 (community investment foundation working with disadvantaged communities)

• London wide organisation for disability £121,200 (new second tier organisation for the disability sector)

• Ealing Community and Voluntary Service £55,770 (support for local organisations)

• Islington Voluntary Action Council £297,268 (support for local organisations)

• Harrow Refugee Forum £200,000 (umbrella body for refugee organisations)

• Southwark Community Care Forum £249,000 (supports voluntary sector groups working in health and social care)

• Croydon BME Forum £415,953 (forum for black, minority, ethnic organisations)

• Refugees in Effective and Active Partnership £149,678 (directory of refugee organisations in West London)

Capacitybuilders has today launched a new web resource for the nine new national support services - which started running today.

For those who’ve already lost the map to the promised land of Destination 2014, Improving Support increases the number of programmes from 6 national hubs to 9 national support services, all on a slimmer budget.

Workforce and ICT have been given additional funding to continue until June because they are not being directly replaced.

The previous regime of 6 hubs of national expertise expired last night on 31 March. Mourners present at the ICT Hub’s bedside said that it had left a “lasting legacy of high quality support materials for the sector.” Hub publications will continue to be free to download from the Hub’s website.

The nine programmes are:
• Collaboration, run by Bassac,
• Equalities and diversity, run by the Women’s Resource Centre
• Income generation, run by Acevo
• Marketing and communications, run by the Media Trust
• Modernising volunteering, run by Volunteering England
• Performance management, run by Charities Evaluation Services
• Campaigning and advocacy, leadership and governance, and responding to social change, all run by the NCVO

Amongst all the rumours seeping out of Capacity Builders regarding the future funding of ICT as a national support service, the fate of the online Knowledgebase and  Suppliers Directory has been curiously absent.

We can only speculate this may be because Capacity Builders believes it holds the copyright to Knowledgebase content and will simply “hoover up” legacy content from the Hubs as they expire, gasping for breath.  We hope the 9 new national workstreams fare better.

However, a quick browse around the Knowledgebase shows that content is protected by a variety of Creative Commons licences that ensures copyright resides with the author, not the funder.

We’ve been lobbying our local Capacity Builders rep along the lines of:

• Knowledgebase and Suppliers Directory are unique resources that have been developed by experts in sector ICT, and are crucial to helping the regional Champs and other providers of technology support to the sector increase sector skills and knowledge - or to put it another way, where else is the sector going to get freely available plain English, jargon-free articles on planning and managing ICT?  Answers on a postcard from Netgain and Experts Online.

• These web based resources are of unique value to the sector and are a good fit with Capacity Builders stated objectives of efficiently and effectively delivering high quality support services with impact on local delivery.

• These resources account for 30,000 hits per month and are helping the sector to make better informed choices about their ICT

Prior to ChangeUp, the Treasury and others described a dynamic voluntary sector - albeit one lacking in the awareness and skills to plan and manage their ICT, which could help improve their service delivery. The Knowledgebase and Suppliers Directory are continually evolving as sector leading resources - there’s nothing else like them.

We hope you’ll agree that Knowledgebase and Suppliers Directory are vital, so blog about it or let us know by commenting.

Disclaimer: This post reflects the views of the author, not the ICT Hub, it’s delivery partners or funders.

It’s been squeaky-bum time for everybody connected with the ICT Hub.

Yesterday afternoon was supposed to see the long awaited announcement of ICT’s fate as a nationally delivered support service, and when no announcement was made, our spies told us that any public announcements on ICT had been delayed until later today. To add grist to the conspiracy theorists mill, the Capacity Builders web site went down at 10am this morning (and is still down at 4pm), a portent of doom that ICT would not survive as a national support service - despite the overwhelming indication from the 9 new national workstreams that it was a key priority.

Watch this space - we’ll bring you the news as soon as we hear or the Capacity Builders website gets back on its feet.

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.

The London ICT Champion gives you the edited highlights from the launch of Capacity Builders Destination 2014 Strategy at Birmingham’s Botanic Gardens on 3 July.

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.

Capacity Builders launched their Destination 2014 strategy one day after consultation on the draft National Support Services Framework closed. Others have blogged that the strategy was generally well received, but to my ears it was received in stony silence.

In the brave new Capacitybuilders world….
The revised Destination 2014 document proposes a single website for front-line groups to locate sources of support.

In a commitment to new simple language, infrastructure has been re-branded as ’support services’ or ’support providers’ and Consortia are now to be known as ’support networks’.

Capacity Builders have also re-branded themselves with a new logo and website after apparent customer dissatisfaction at the previous versions.

London Consortia showcased:
The London ICT Champion was present as one of 6 ‘champion’ projects from our region, along with CIO and Ealing Community Resource Centre. We did plenty of networking and made some useful new contacts, including Community Alliance, who are very keen to work with us.

For more on the London region case-studies, go here:

ICT in the regions:
ICT was represented or showcased on 8 of the 9 regional stands. This clearly proves that ICT support is NOT unimportant and is still something to be funded, a point which I laboured to Gill Walsh, our regional co-ordinator.

North East - VONNE ICT Champion
North West - Cheshire and Warrington Sub-Region ICT strategy on show
Yorks & Humbs - North Yorks Forum ICT service showcased
East Midlands - Voluntary Action Leicester - IT Trading for Change
West Midlands - Illuminate ICT of Coventry
South West – Cosmic: Evolve project showcased
London - London ICT Champion and Lasa
East of England - AFL, Shuttle and Circuit Riders

Social Enterprise:
Social enterprise is writ large into the strategy - but it is not clearly defined what Capacity Builders really mean. Are they talking about income generating activities (like training, room hire, etc) or have they decided that the market should now provide infrastructure support services to the sector and be funded supported with ChangeUp money for its trouble?

National Support Services (NSS) Framework:
On the question of the much heralded draft NSS framework, Chief Executive Simon Hebditch said the draft was a genuinely flexible framework and that all responses would be considered. For the record, there were 135 written responses of which 110 were a model letter from the Volunteering Hub campaign

The D2014 document still only mentions 4 national support services, with ICT filed under ‘Performance’.

What else?
Turnout: 250-300 people representing consortia projects from all over the country. Verdict: Reasonable given the atrocious weather conditions and collapse of public transport.

Interactive theatre experience: Capacity Builders hired a theatre group dressed as builders (geddit) to explain their new strategy to an invited audience already familiar with the Capacity Builders aganda. We were also treated to a 15 minute skit on the Star Trek version of Capacity Builders new strategy. Verdict: You couldn’t make it up.

Thanks to Jackie Carey of Community First, the West Midlands new Regional ICT Champion, for flagging this story up:

Earlier this week, a Charity Finance report on Capacitybuilders draft tender for national support services said:

“ICT as a support service seems to have significantly lower levels of need/support,” Capacitybuilders added.

At first sight this goes against everything that we’ve been working for and have been hearing from stakeholders from the frontline to funders alike.

On closer investigation, it turns out the quote is lifted from unatributed responses to Capacitybuilders Destination 2014 consultation exercises carried out earlier in the year, and already in the public domain. As one anonymous witness at one of the consultation exercises says:

I attended the consultation and (as anyone else who was there will agree) the section about National Hubs primarily consisted of sticking traffic light coloured dots on a list of current and potential national support services.

The audience were mainly infrastructure organisations (from a whole range of disciplines) who were being asked (whilst balancing lunch plates!) to stick dots on what their perception of what their local groups valued. Front line groups were not (my emphasis) being asked what their actual ICT service and support needs were.

Following on from Charity Finance’s article, off-the-record feedback from Capacitybuilders suggest that although the ChangeUp landscape post April 2008 is going to radically change with less money and fewer themes, ICT is still regarded as a priority for supporting the work of frontline organisations.

We hope this remains the case, and the ICT Hub and the Regional ICT Champions have been busy ensuring that sector’s ICT needs are met at local level. If any doubt, check out the ICT Hub pages on the the Knowledgebase, Suppliers’ Directory, publications and events.

To grossly summarise the draft tender document, Capacitybuilders is proposing to:

• Replace the six ChangeUp hubs with four National Support Services on the themes of finance, performance, workforce and a new area called ‘voice’.
• Bundle ICT into the performance theme along with mergers and collaborations, communications and monitoring.

The draft tender document has this to say about the perceived ICT needs of the sector:

Capacitybuilders believes that the outstanding needs in relation to ICT are:

• For all organisations - ensuring that the ICT needs are fully integrated into the strategic planning process as a whole.

• For small, new organisations - especially those operating where skill levels and material resources are likely to exclude people involved in voluntary and community action (including social enterprise) from getting on line and accessing information, support and networks, and from running normal small office functions, and Data Protection compliance.

Therefore subsidised (grant-aided) support should be restricted to organisations which are very small and small only.

• very small organisations <£10,000 p.a.
• small organisations >£10,000 <£100,000 p.a.

Medium-sized organisations that are >100,000 to £1 million are more able themselves to resource the maintenance and gradual improvement of their systems, but can face ICT challenges, such as step-change investment in hardware, software and skills to provide new and innovative services as well as enabling them to reach audiences they previously have not been able to reach.

Work priorities could include:

• developing and promoting ICT volunteering and circuit rider initiatives as appropriate models of support for third sector orgaisations. Develop the capacity of circuit riders and provide accredited circuit rider training.
• a national ICT support franchise – low cost remote and on-site support for stand-alone computers and small networks.
• enabling (and delivering?) training and resources for specialist ICT and generic infrastructure agencies
• helping infrastructure agencies develop sustainable ICT support services including pump priming fund
• increasing the range of relevant and affordable private sector products and services
• co-producing a series of resources to help frontline and infrastructure groups ensure their ICT is accessible

As far as the London ICT Champion project goes, we’re already delivering on some of the above - such as supporting circuit rider projects, accredited training, pump priming and and working towards the rest in London ICT strategy, which will be available from all good bookshops this Autumn.

Watch this space for more news as the Capacitybuilders’ tender process shapes up.

The London Regional ChangeUp Consortium has secured £2m for London’s 39 Consortia to 2008.

Consortia projects are located in every borough and sub-region. Your very own London Region ICT Champion is set to be joined by ‘pan-London champions’ for Equalities and Workforce Development.

Projects cover:

• Equalities
• Volunteering
• Social Enterprise
• Community Development
• Workforce Development
• Local Area Agreements
• ICT
• Premises
• 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games

You can get the full list of grants here.