Resilience and early intervention:A voluntary sector perspective

Maggie Jones Children England

22nd March 2013Resilient Families

UCLan and Howgill SymposiumWest Cumbria

About Children England

• The leading membership organisation for charities and community groups working with children, young people and families in England

• Supporting and representing the sector since 1940’s• Membership network of over 100,000 like-minded

people working across the sector• Represent the full diversity of the sector• Overarching Strategic Partner to DfE for the VCSE sector

Our Mission: To create a fairer world for children and young people by championing the voluntary organisations which work on their behalf

The CYP&F Voluntary Sector• 64,000 charities (half of all charities) in England have

children, young people and families as their main beneficiaries (2009/10 data)

• And 21,000 ‘civil society’ organisations (half of all)• Total income - £3.3 billion (core c.yp.f service sector),

PLUS £8.7billion in wider sector serving cyp as part, but not focus, of delivery

• 96% operate at local level only• 54% do not employ any paid staff• 91% annual income of less than £100k• 53% under £10k income• Only 1% of total income from corporates

The Voluntary sector role in building resilient families

Respect and self worth

Strengths based approach

Non stigmatising services

Whole person/ child/family approach

Often grew from and steered by peers

Community and cross sector links

No wrong front door

“Stitch in time” approach

’

Perfect Storms • Aim: to capture the cumulative impact of the

pressures faced by the CYP VCS, our statutory partners and CYPF that we support

• Not a representative survey of the sector and it produces no new statistical data

• Interviews with over 50 people from the VCS and statutory, including commissioners

• Based on these in-depth interviews and wider statistics, we suggest that there are two perfect storms, one affecting the VCS business model and the other local areas

Challenges for maintaining the voluntary sector role in resilience and early intervention

1. Operational challenges• Delivering through instability, churn and rapidity of change within

the operating environment • The impacts and costs of Competition and Collaboration• Maximising the power and capacity of volunteering and charity

donation, without exploiting them as a cost-saving measure• Sharing and transferring risk and liability in contracting• ‘Reward’ based payment vehicles (eg PBR)• Impacts of short-term funding on service continuity, workforce

stability, and demonstrable outcomes for children and families

• The myth of early intervention funding

2. Identity challenges

• Arm of the state?• Lose the capacity to be bottom up• Single function based services• No room for innovation and radicalism• Holding higher levels of risk can undermine early

support• Families see using us as a mark of failure not

empowerment

VCS role in alternative local service economies

Edgar Cahn and the Core Economy VCS economy, based on gift, reciprocity, self help

and philanthropy VCS as bridge between the Core and Cash based

economies In creating value from things and with people others

leave behind, we give them a status and build confidence

Communities creating value for themselves

So how do we support families and communities to weather the storms?

• Three sectors playing to their own strengths not wasting time on a lowest common denominator model. Lets find where it works

• Challenge and resist purely commercial solutions to human relationship based services

• We must find better ways of valuing the un-costed and un-seen

• Could make a major contribution to Pre-distribution in the longer term

• Use local political capital: local charities, communities and councillors/ elected and appointed board members

• It may feel un-tested and unsure, but so are most Government policies and all recent attempts to rebuild economies!

These are the times we were made for.

The children, young people and families we work with need us more

than ever before

We cant afford to let them down

Thank Youwww.childrenengland.org.uk