Making the Transition - Implementing Change

On Monday I had the pleasure of meeting a group of inspiring voluntary sector leaders, all doing a brilliant job of dealing with massively complex issues.  The Making the Transition event is exclusively for recipients of the Transition Fund, the fund set up to provide some support to those charities heavily involved in delivering public sector services and which have experienced very significant cuts.

The leaders there ran organisations supporting carers, young people, older people, people with mental health problems, disabled people, BME communities, and many others. They ran community farms, legal advice centres, domestic violence programmes, employment and skills services, and a host of other brilliant things.

All of them were dealing with the triple whammy of increased demand for services, huge cuts in income, and the loss or reduction of support from sector infrastructure agencies.  Most of them had made - or were about to make - many posts redundant in their organisations. At least one person was being made redundant himself that week, but had come anyway to see if he could get some ideas to help his organisation. Everyone was dealing, day-to-day, with major strategic challenges, highly complex operational issues and raw emotions.

I offered a simple prezi as a reminder of some of the emotional issues involved in implementing change. Of course many people there had been there, done that and worn the (blood-stained) T-shirt and I wanted to avoid a case of telling grandma to suck eggs, so kept it short to allow more time for discussion.

What I took from the day was how brilliant our sector is, and how, in times of adversity, there is a real pulling together. There was a great clarion call from one of the delegates for us as a sector to really move beyond the parochialism that can stop our organisations from collaborating, and a real desire to work together - even at the same time as we continue to fairly compete. There was also a real desire for the delegates to share their experiences of good and bad practices by local authorities, so that we as a sector can help local authorities to better understand what 'good' looks like - something I've asked my colleagues here at NCVO to consider taking forwards.

It was great for NCVO to work with Bates Wells and Braithwaite, CASS Centre for Charity Effectiveness, Action Planning, Sayer Vincent and Compass Consulting to put on this free event. A good example of competitors collaborating. The feedback was good and we got some very useful constructive comments for ways to improve it for the second event in October.