SUSTAINABLE MODELS OF SUPPORT SERVICES: CASE STUDY
Community Action Hampshire
Positioning the consortium as
the “Gateway to the sector”
The newly established
Hampshire Voluntary Sector
Consortium is already
showing its potential to
build sustainability among
the county’s voluntary and
community organisations
by increasing their
reputation among statutory
partners – individually and
as a group.
Hampshire Voluntary Sector Consortium
(HVSC) is a county wide partnership of third
sector support bodies, including Community
Action Hampshire, eleven district Councils
for Voluntary Service, frontline third sector
organisations (TSOs) and statutory partners. It
has a clear view of how to use Capacitybuilders
funding to build sectoral sustainability: for
HVSC, the sustainability of Hampshire’s
support organisations comes from increasing
their reputation among statutory partners
– individually and as a group. This strategy,
set out in the Consortium’s Infrastructure
Development Plan, has guided its work to
create a county-wide consortium and position
it as the primary “gateway to the sector” in
Hampshire.
What Capacitybuilders funding was
received?
Hampshire Voluntary Sector Consortium is the
ChangeUp consortium for Hampshire. Its lead body is
Community Action Hampshire, whose Chief Executive is
Chair of the Consortium. Having been awarded £99,000
consortium development funding from Capacitybuilders
in 2007, the Consortium appointed a senior officer to
lead consortium development work.
From the outset the focus was on establishing the
Consortium’s reputation among partners by investing
in relationship-building at the senior level, not simply
creating new structures. The overarching aim of the senior
officer’s role is “to be able to co-ordinate strategically-
focused activity”, as opposed to piecemeal projects.
According to the Chair, the new Consortium “enables us
to be seen as the gateway to the sector” and has already
led to the creation of a HVSC seat on the Hampshire
Senate, the county-wide strategic partnership.
How can one Consortium ‘represent’
10,000 organisations?
Hampshire is England’s third largest county by
population, and has some 10,000 third sector
organisations. The sheer size, geographic spread,
and diversity of the sector therefore presented a big
challenge at the start of the consortium development
project. The Consortium uses a ‘network of networks’
model, with each network themed around the service
areas in which Hampshire’s TSOs are involved. So far
these include: children and young people, adult health
and social care, equality and diversity, social enterprise,
district CVSs, Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, volunteer
centres, and skills and learning. The networks are a mix
of new and existing groups.
Each network has been invited to send a representative
to the Consortium. In order to ensure that the network is
representative of a wider group of TSOs, the Consortium
requires that members accept the responsibility for
communicating feedback to members of their network
and are accountable to them.
The Consortium member that takes the Hampshire
Senate seat must serve for two years and report
against success measures agreed with their Consortium
colleagues. This is a standing agenda item at Consortium
meetings, alongside written reports from each of the
thematic networks. The seat is currently taken by the
Chair of Hampshire Citizen’s Advice Bureaux.
The Consortium has also worked to fill ‘gaps’ in
support and involve groups that had not previously
been represented. For example, Community Action
Hampshire’s Diversity Support Project has set up a
network as part of a series of linked activities. Part
funded by the Big Lottery Fund, its objectives are closely
connected to consortium development as they include
assembling an independent equality forum to work
with the Consortium (there has been no Race Equality
Council in the county). However, the Consortium knew
there were gaps in the existing support to organisations
serving the County’s minority communities and
simply setting up a forum in isolation made no sense.
The forum was therefore complemented by a skills
programme to train staff in voluntary organisations on
how to implement a diversity toolkit and carry out
diversity audits.
The forum was formally launched in November 2009
after a broad and inclusive consultation process. This has
also provided spin-off benefits such as the recruitment
of forum members who had no previous experience of
joining formal civic activity. For instance the forum has
recruited one member from a small informal group of
adults with learning difficulties who meet for meals and
discussion.
Engaging strategically with partners
The Health and Social Care Network has been
particularly successful in thematic representation – it now
has over 260 members from around 190 organisations
across the county. It has also been used to engage the
board of the Primary Care Trust in an on-going strategic
dialogue of a kind that had not existed before. The
HVSC Chair made contact with the PCT board early
on, explaining how the network could help the PCT in
achieving its aims - for instance by convening cross-
sector discussion about the likely impact of budget cuts,
or identifying how the sector could help the PCT where
pressure was greatest.
The strategic dialogue with the NHS is now maturing and
senior figures in NHS Hampshire believe it is valuable
and has come at a good time. As NHS Hampshire’s
director of performance and standards put it:
“The value of this dialogue will be particularly important
going forward into the most challenging financial climate
the health service has seen for many years.”
In the short time it has existed he believes the
Consortium has already been
“incredibly valuable in helping NHS Hampshire develop
a collaborative relationship with the sector,”
as well as supporting the delivery of the PCT’s strategic
goals. It is also a ‘gateway’ for on-going engagement in
the future around commissioning intentions, as well as
for more in-depth consultations on specific services. The
Consortium’s lead officer agrees:
“The public sector needs to make sure they can
commission good services that meet people’s needs,
and we’re seen as critical to doing that. They also need
a mechanism for engaging with the sector, which is
difficult to engage otherwise because it’s so disparate.”
The lead project officer for the Consortium has also
been tasked with other projects which will contribute to
sustainability and reputation.
These include the development of a guide for managers
in the statutory agencies, describing how third sector
activities support delivery of the Hampshire Local Area
Agreement (LAA), exemplified with case studies. The
Consortium felt that while statutory agencies are aware of
the large role of third sector organisations in contracted
social care delivery, they are much less aware of small
scale (and financially less secure) social support - which
often contributes tangibly to achievement of LAA targets.
Engaging with the LAA and statutory partners in this way
has helped to ensure that the support provided from
the public sector is relevant to the local third sector. For
example, as more public sector resources were being
put into advice and guidance around resilience, the
Consortium was able to ensure that the sector’s needs
were taken into account. The Consortium is also able to
identify opportunities for local TSOs around new policy
agendas, such as personalisation of social care.
“It’s made us more sustainable because our support
services are relevant… identified by public sector
partners as supporting a shared agenda, and by frontline
organisations as what they want.”
Lead Officer, HVSC
So how has Capacitybuilders funding
added value and made support services
more sustainable?
Getting the Consortium operational and being offered
the Senate seat have in themselves been a major part of
building reputation, stability and sustainability, as well as
opening up new opportunities for the sector. They have
also led directly to better working relationships between
statutory partners and Hampshire’s 10,000 TSOs.
The sum of all this work means more third sector
organisations participate in events and consultation.
Involving a broader range of local TSOs means the
consortium can act as the ‘gateway to the third sector’. In a
large county such as Hampshire this is invaluable to public
sector partners looking to engage with the sector. The
Consortium now regularly has statutory bodies wanting
to attend or present at its meetings. The PCT in particular
views working with the Consortium as one of the ways it
can meet its obligations to engage with the third sector.
This, combined with pro-active promotion of the work
of third sector organisations, has increased statutory
partners’ recognition of the value of the third sector, and
the importance of the consortium’s work. Over the long-
term this recognition means the consortium is better
placed to make the case to statutory partners for third
sector support services in the county in the future.
An additional benefit is that the Consortium saves
valuable time and energy for smaller organisations by
This case study was prepared by Shared Intelligence for the Sustainable Models of Support Services report, which was
funded by Capacitybuilders. To read more case studies like this please visit: www.improvingsupport.org.uk
building relationships on behalf of the whole sector. The
Health and Social Care network does this very effectively
and efficiently through a simple email mailing list. For
example, it recently alerted organisations to a PCT
stakeholder event on developing the commissioning
specification for stroke rehabilitation enabling enough
of the ‘right people’ to get involved, but without
duplicating effort around communications.
Finally, there is real value in engaging a wider cross-
section of individuals in governance of the Consortium.
Over time, it is expected that this will improve the
third sector’s ability to identify needs and continuously
respond to an ever-changing context.
The real test of whether the Consortium is sustainable
will be when the Consortium Development funding
period ends in March 2011. With the basic structures
and relationships now in place the Consortium members
and support staff have already turned their attention to
the challenge of sustaining the Consortium. Community
Action Hampshire as the county-level member and
accountable body is taking the lead. One option already
identified is for Consortium members to share out the
management of the Consortium between themselves –
not putting in cash, but making officer time available.
There might also be further opportunities to seek grant-
funding to support the Consortium. Discussions are also
in train with the Consortium’s statutory partners.
What the Consortium members hope is that the
reputation and recognition they have clearly built
within the county, and the value they have begun to
offer to partners and consortium members, can now be
translated into sustainability.
Learning points
• Partners value single county-wide structures through
which to engage with the sector, for strategic reasons
and for practical reasons (it’s more efficient for them)
• Operational initiatives to support sustainability
such as training, must be accompanied by strategic
leadership level relationship-building
• Transparency and good management has been
crucial in setting up structures that can act to
represent thousands of different dispersed
community organisations
• Explaining TSO activities in terms of their contribution
to Local Area Agreement priorities has been very
effective in engaging officers in statutory agencies.