So, what is the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (VCSEP)?
After the major tragedies of 2017, with Grenfell Tower fire perhaps the most extreme, the voluntary and community sector were united in their view that ‘we’ can, and must, do better. There are lots of lessons we can learn from that experience, and arguably the greatest is that a lack of coordination and an inconsistent focus on community awareness and understanding, contribute to an even more traumatic experience for the people most impacted by a major emergency.
In 2018, a group of organisations came together to form a partnership with a commitment to improve the collaboration and coordination of the third sector in times of emergency, with a real emphasis on ensuring that connections between community grass roots organisations were supported by, not superseded by, the bigger players. And so the VCSEP (catchy, we know), was born.
Co-chaired by the British Red Cross, and NAVCA, an umbrella organisation at the forefront of local community action, the partnership is a growing family of traditional emergency response players, a range of community and local infrastructure organisations and key associates from local and national government agencies.
The first two years of the partnership were spent working a few things out, cutting our teeth on regional flooding emergencies and, truthfully, slowly building a sense that it was worth thinking about how we could be more powerful in our individual ambitions, together. That requires time, trust, and a real test, before you know it’s real.
That test came in March 2020.
Below, I’m going to set out what we created at pace in March to help the Covid19 pandemic, and what we’ve been tweaking and working on so far. It is not perfect, but it is a huge step forward, and we continue to learn as individuals, as organisations and as a collective.
What are we trying to achieve?
Three simple objectives; to better understand unmet need together, to take action to meet that need together, and ultimately to achieve greater collaboration and coordination between the voluntary and community sector at all levels, and between the sector and local and state government.
How we plan to do it
- Gather and convene people, data, intelligence and capability from across the sector
- Inform decisions and actions we take as a sector based on meaningful, actionable insight
- Respond, in collaboration, not competition. Effectively filling gaps, distributing resources and support across the sector.
- Influence decision and policy makers, locally and nationally to address the challenges seen by the sector, with a collective voice.
What are we actually doing?
There’s a fair bit going on… so I’ll try to keep this simple.
1) At the centre, we have a small group of people (including me), working on what the VCSEP should be — what’s the model? Is it different in peace time? Is it different for different emergencies? How would we fund it? How do we continue to strengthen our relationships with government? We have been granted £5m by the Department of Culture Media and Sport to make a difference during Covid19 through the activities below, get the right foundations in place for future emergencies and answer the questions above. No pressure.
2) We have a small but mighty team focused on getting the right people, processes, tools and technologies in place to help us better understand who are most adversely affected, and where there are gaps in support for those people. They are working across the sector to gather data and intelligence and build a range of tools to make this possible. It takes time, but we have already introduced a couple of new things to make taking action around the needs of those most severely impacted easier;
- The Request for Support service helps local organisations ask the sector for extra help and resources when local demand is testing capacity and the ability to respond locally
- A WebMap which layers different sets of data on top of each other allowing operational teams to delve into the needs, resources and activity happening and gaps in any area of the country
3) We have created five “multi agency” cells across England bringing together national, regional and local community groups to act as a regional backstop for the sector. Focused on engaging with (not replacing) the existing structures already in place, and responding to requests for help. Five teams have formed, stormed and normed during this pandemic to create a much stronger sense of togetherness and cooperation at the regional level. It’s early days, but we have started to see success stories where national, regional and local players have worked together to respond quickly and effectively.
4) We have also created a single front door for the government to access the voluntary sector. Bringing together the major volunteering organisations including RVS, St John Ambulance, NAVCA, NCVO, British Red Cross and Volunteering Matters, to streamline and respond to government asks for volunteering with one sector voice and improve clarity on the volunteering capacity we have as a sector.
Finally, now we have something, we need to continue to build the profile and position of the Emergencies Partnership. Building relationships and trust locally remains the priority, while we also consider what else we can do to promote what we’re trying to achieve. Working in the open, being transparent about what we’re learning, and how we’re getting closer to our vision is a key part of this.
Personally, I’m proud of what we have done together so far, but the to-do list is a long one, and with each step forward we uncover more challenges and complexity as we seek to put the individuals impacted at the centre of every emergency, whilst balancing the many different players in the space.
It’s absolutely the right thing to do, but it ain’t easy. Watch this space.
