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Collaborative working case studies

 

Working together to achieve your mission

  • Find Your Feet and Harvest Help are UK-based international development agencies. They have a joint sustainable livelihood programme in Malawi, run from a joint office by local staff who are employed by both agencies.
  • Shelter and Stonewall Housing ran a 15-month long joint project to tackle housing problems faced by lesbian, gay and bisexual people and promote good practice in the services that support them.
  • Faith Regen UK is a national multi-faith organisation which uses partnership working to reach otherwise excluded target groups through local and culturally appropriate points of entry such as places of worship.
  • The South London CVS Partnership aims to aim to ensure that the voluntary and community sector has effective local representation across 6 boroughs, and that everyone is able to share best practice, skills and expertise.
  • Three livestock breed societies - the British Limousin Cattle Society, Suffolk Sheep Society and Texel Sheep Society - jointly commissioned a specialist database to act as an online herd/flock book for the societies' members, providing them with a focal point for registration of animals and recording of pedigree, performance and health data.
  • The National Library for the Blind and National Blind Children's Society launched a new children's Giant Print free postal lending library service, having identified that there was nowhere for partially sighted children or teenagers to borrow large print books.

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Joint working for public service delivery

  • The SensAbility project is run by two organisations - Learning Links and Hampshire Deaf Association - and trains sensory impaired people to become advocates, mentors and advisers, helping other sensory impaired people access educational opportunities.
  • Young People's Training Consortium was formed by a group of Hull organisations to submit a tender for a Learning and Skills Council contract to work with 13-19 year olds.
  • The Cardigan Centre is the lead of three organisations collaborating on Active 4 Life, a 'virtual' healthy living centre which runs activities across North West Leeds which take a community development approach to health improvements.
  • The Federation of Voluntary Sector Care Providers was established in 1994 to promote home based care in Southwark by supporting and developing local voluntary organisations to participate in the mixed provision of social care.
  • Advance Housing & Support and Carr-Gomm have together set up Work-in-Progress, a new charitable company to help people with mental health problems find supported employment.
  • Royal National Institute of the Deaf, Royal National Institute of the Blind and the British Red Cross formed the Community Equipment Consortium in April 2005 to improve the provision of equipment for people with disabilities.

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Sharing back office services

  • West Yorkshire Community Accounting Service has five Council for Voluntary Service members, and provides financial services for voluntary and community organisations in West Yorkshire.
  • Five Bromley organisations together formed Bromley Voluntary Sector Trust, established as a separate registered charity to manage Community House in Bromley town centre.
  • CharITyshare is a limited company set up in January 2005 to manage the IT services of NSPCC and The Children's Society.
  • The Charities Buying Group offers its members ways of cutting costs through a wide range of purchasing agreements, thereby releasing funds for members' charitable activities.
  • Mezzanine 2 is a social enterprise created by Community Action Network, providing premises and support services to a range of voluntary organisations by licensing space to them in modern office accommodation.
  • Carr-Gomm provides finance, IT, HR and property maintenance services to the London-based Alcohol Recovery Project (ARP), replacing ARP's in-house services.
  • The Association of Voluntary Organisations Wrexham runs a charged payroll service for 70 local organisations; calculating salaries, tax and National Insurance contributions for the organisations and sending out payslips.

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Merger

  • Wells Old Almshouses and Llewellyn, Charles and Harper's Almshouse Trust merged in 2004 to become City of Wells Almshouses, driving in part by the difficulty that the trusts faced in finding suitable new trustees.
  • CLIC (Cancer Leukaemia in Childhood) and Sargent Cancer Care for Children merged to become CLIC Sargent in January 2005. The two charities provided complementary services, were a similar size and had collaborated in the past.
  • Milton House and City Roads were two medium sized London organisations working with drug users. They merged to form The Odyssey Trust in 2002.
  • Volunteering England was created in 2004 through the merger of the Consortium on Opportunities for Volunteering, the National Centre for Volunteering and Volunteer Development England.
  • An abandoned merger: as two small charities with similar aims and objectives, Group A approached Group B to set up discussions on a possible merger to strengthen their core activities and develop new projects, but was abandoned for a variety of reasons.
  • When it faced financial difficulties, some of National Newpin's funders were prepared to help its services continue so, after discussion, Family Welfare Association, a large national charity, agreed that it would take over the operation of most of Newpin's services.

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National organisations with local groups

  • The Mind network comprises over 200 independent Local Mind Associations affiliated to the national Mind organisation on payment of an annual affiliation fee. 
  • Friends of the Earth is a national organisation working through about 200 local groups. These groups are constitutionally branches of the national body and remain bound by national policy, but can campaign as they wish on issues that have local relevance.
  • Relate is a federation of 80 local Relate Centres providing relationship support and sex therapy services.
  • The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) operates as a national network of 43 independently registered county branches, over 200 district groups, nine regional groups and its national office in London.
  • There are 47 Wildlife Trusts across the UK, Isle of Man and Alderney, with 37 in England. Each is an independent charity with a clear geographic remit, driven by its members.
  • The Alzheimer's Society is one organisation working at a national and regional level, and locally through branches. It has one set of trustees and one governing document.

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ICT tools to support collaborative working

  • DirectSupport is a free guidance and mentoring service for UK online centres, focusing mainly on community and voluntary UK online centres. DirectSupport uses an extranet for web based collaboration.
  • Charity Web Forum is an email group set up by the Royal National Institute for the Blind to facilitate charities sharing information and knowledge about the web.
  • Community Action Network (CAN) is a UK organisation for social entrepreneurs. CAN uses an internet-based contacts database which is managed by all its staff and partners.
  • Leicestershire County Council has been building up an ICT community to help address rural isolation by providing information and services electronically. It uses a Content Management System to allow communities to manage their own information.
  • ruralnet|uk is a rural regeneration charity that promotes a living and working countryside and finds new ways to help rural communities improve and strengthen their local economies. ruralnet|uk distributes its daily online digest of development news in the form of a blog.
  • ladder4learning promotes learning for people and organisations in the community and voluntary in South East England. It uses a wiki to provide a regularly updated jargon buster for the voluntary and community sector.
  • VolResource aims to provide practical resources for people involved in the voluntary sector, making use of communications technology. It uses an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed to disseminate news items for the voluntary sector.

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Collaborative working to make more effective use of ICT

  • The ICT Hub is a partnership of national Voluntary and Community Organisations providing a range of services to assist organisations in the voluntary and community sector to access the benefits of ICT.
  • Community First: The Herefordshire and Worcestershire Infrastructure Consortia are working to make sure that voluntary organisations and community groups can access the support and services they need to achieve their aims.
  • The 5 Counties Project - working across Cumbria, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and Cheshire - sought to deliver an accredited ICT management training module; to disseminate work on Data Protection and corporate IT filing systems; to co-ordinate e-communities networks; and to develop mechanisms for sharing electronic data.
  • BME Complementary Learning Network: Four organisations providing a network of out-of-hours education support have collaborated in a project involving equipment purchase, co-ordinated delivery of courses and shared monitoring.
  • The Ethical Property IT Department offers a wide range of services to their tenants, including access to a communal high speed broadband line, a sophisticated phone system, and access to a communal server.
  • Common Database: The infrastructure consortium within York and North Yorkshire identified a need for a central system for storing data within the sub region in order to increase efficiency and reduce duplication.

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Staffing a collaborative project

  • The South London CVS Partnership exists to facilitate and provide representation for the voluntary and community sector at sub-regional level; to facilitate sharing of best practice, skills and expertise; to establish and develop relationships with sub-regional/regional bodies; and to develop common policy positions and operational strategies reflecting the diversity of the sub-region.
  • Action for Change, a small local organisation, worked with Addaction, a national organisation, to provide services for drug and alcohol users in Brighton.
  • The Sunshine Healthy Living Project is a cluster of ten voluntary and statutory, large and small, local, regional and national organisations.

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Collaborative working between large and small organisations

Read brief descriptions of the large and small organisations case studies, or click on the links below for full versions.

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Collaboration on HR

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Volunteer Centres: Local delivery, sub-regional structures

  • This case study explores how Volunteer Centres have begun a process of change in order to improve local delivery through developing sub-regional structures. It features numerous examples from across England, and includes valuable lessons learned from the change process.

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