After a week of flu and I don’t mind telling you it was real flu, not man flu, it’s back to business and this week promises to be an important watershed for the Cornwall Voluntary Sector. With the new VSF Council Commissioning Board set to meet for the first time, finally we have a strategic level input in to the future of Cornwall and hopefully some real influence over what happens for the people of Cornwall.
The Commissioning Board is to my knowledge fairly unique across the country and brings together public and voluntary sector leaders to discuss key services that help people and community. The Board is arranged across 10 themes that range from social care to social enterprise and each theme has both a senior commissioning representative from the council and a senior theme lead from the Voluntary Sector with the Cornwall VSF providing vital oversight and scrutiny.
The aim of the group is to bring consistency to commissioned services, ensure clear communication routes and to provide a forum for innovative services to be developed. It is the last objective that is so exciting…whilst there are clearly immediate concerns about ensuring vital services are maintained to those in most need, and this will be the immediate priority of the Board, there is also a huge opportunity to discuss and develop innovative ideas around future direction for Cornwall which could and should involve social enterprise at the heart of this delivery.
So I can’t wait for the inaugural board meeting with the council so we can really get stuck in…
As if one momentous meeting in a week wasn’t enough, on Friday we see the first major Work Programme get together….
This jamboree will undoubtedly take the form of informal speed dating, trying to match up Prime Providers (national organisations who will win the right to manage the Government’s Workless agenda) with delivery organisations (the one’s on the ground doing the work to get people back in to employment). This type of speed dating is pretty basic and doesn’t exactly engender partnership working, as it tends to be a survival of the fittest and who can get to the front of the queue first…so I’m hoping that Cornish partners will work together and use their experience of partnership working on projects like Cornwall Works, to really sell what Cornwall can do.
In fact we’ve got to do that, or the people who need us most could risk losing the services and programmes that they have benefitted from. Although some question the level of EU funding we have had, this is where it has made a real difference, because Cornwall has been able to try things out that otherwise would not be fundable, in doing that it means we’ve created some really interesting and innovative delivery that often get’s better results than mainstream provision can on its own, and this is all down to added value….being able to link up with other programmes and partners to deliver multiple outcomes…if we’re lucky, mainstream Prime Providers will see the benefit of working with partners delivering on EU programmes in Cornwall because of the added value it can bring to their work…we’ll see!
So by the end of this week, we’ll have some sense of direction on Public Sector Commissioning and on how the Work Programme will go forward…big week!
Jon Rolls
Chief Executive
