Objectives

We have built our work around three strategic themes:

Practical support for your organisation and community 

Practical support is one of the highest priorities for community and voluntary organisations. We aim to be the first port of call for VCSE organisations needing support to achieve their goals, from help finding funding and running an organisation to engaging your community and strategic planning.

Our approach has always been to provide a mixture of reactive support where we respond to the needs you come to us with, and pro-active support where we try to stimulate initiatives and activities within a community or organisation.

Leading VCSE engagement in Norfolk

Community Action Norfolk is the leading organisation for engagement with the VCSE sector in Norfolk.

We work closely with VCSE organisations, Norfolk County Council and other partners to build the positive relationships needed to collaboratively develop strategy, policy and services.

For us, VCSE engagement is about gathering your ideas, issues and challenges and bringing them together with those of other VCSE organisations and stakeholders to create a positive dialogue so we can collaboratively find ways to make Norfolk stronger and fairer.

Community Action Norfolk, as part of a partnership comprising Norfolk Specialist Partnership and Momentum (Norfolk), has been funded by Norfolk County Council to deliver a programme of Voluntary and Community Sector engagement focused on the following outcomes:

• Effective two-way communication between Norfolk County Council and voluntary and community sector organisations
• Increased participation and contribution in planning and decision-making, by a wider range of voluntary sector organisations including smaller organisations, organisations which work with more marginalised groups of people and new organisations
• Improved access to information and expert advice about the sector
• Increased collaboration between Norfolk County Council and the community to achieve the best possible outcomes for families and adults living in Norfolk communities

The partnership has been funded to deliver this work in the Clinical Commissioning Group areas for North Norfolk, West Norfolk, Norwich and South Norfolk.

Working to ensure fair outcomes for all

It is a challenging time; reductions in public sector funding will continue to affect many with additional savings to be made. These savings risk hitting the most vulnerable in our communities the hardest or creating unfair discrepancies in the way people are treated.

The impacts of an ageing population and other changes in our communities are changing the way services need to be provided. This creates the need to move towards more preventative and integrated services which offer the promise of being better for individuals and more cost-effective for providers. However, across many themes and organisations in what is a large rural county, delivering on that promise is hard.

Our goal is to work to ensure fair outcomes for everyone regardless of where they live or who they are.

What we mean by strategic advocacy- Strategic advocacy is about taking groups of instances or recurring themes that are causing challenges or creating benefit. It is then about taking those patterns and using them to facilitate changes to the ways things are done in the future, rather than provide redress in those specific instances where problems have taken place.  There are many excellent VCSE organisations that provide individual advocacy supporting people who have faced a specific challenge. We don’t want to duplicate this activity and also recognise that individual advocacy is not something we have capacity to do effectively, fairly and in a high quality way.