Strategic Forum

Strategic Third Sector Forum

The role of the Infrastructure Strategic Third Sector Forum (STSF) is to enable Third Sector engagement in planning, policy development, implementation, and service delivery. The forum will address issues and needs with policy makers funding providers and commissioners.

 

Vision

Third Sector and Public Sector partners aim to support a healthy effective, thriving and sustainable Third Sector in the North East region. Partners will work together to reflect the needs of both sectors in line with the public service agreement to build more cohesive, empowered and active communities.

 

Aims

  • To encourage a shared understanding of each other's roles in delivering the vision
  • To discuss and influence a broad policy agenda, debate reports, papers, needs analysis for impact at a regional level
  • To influence the development of regional policy and distribution of resources
  • To make links between third sector, public sector and funding providers to encourage sustainability for work identified by the consortia in the region and the North East Meta Plan.
  • To identify specialist regional infrastructure needs across the third sector and identify new partnerships and projects.
  • To effectively allocate infrastructure resources for regional infrastructure organisations.
  • To bring together organisations working across the region often in a specific field of work and with a particular focus and to share models of good practice
  • To develop cohesion and co-ordination in the region for infrastructure and Third Sector needs
  • To create an equality of opportunity for Third Sector to deliver services
  • To rationalise the information and support offered to the Third Sector eg. procurement
  • To promote the equalities agenda and work towards mainstreaming equality and diversity across all the sectors.

 

Membership

A flexible membership will include experts and advocates of the chosen themes of the meetings which will be invited to the partnership on an ad hoc basis. A chair and vice chair will be voted from the core group.

A core group will consist of the following organisations:

Government Office North East, ONE North East, Association of North East Councils, North East Assembly, LSP Managers Forum, Learning & Skills Council, Business Link NE, Strategic Health Authority, Job Centre Plus, National Offender Management Service, VONNE (Voluntary Organisations Network North East), BECON (Black and Ethnic Communities Organisation Network), NESEP (North East Social Enterprise Partnership), FINE (Funding Information North East), Funders Forum, VCS Equalities Coalition, Northumberland Consortium, Tyne & Wear Consortium, County Durham Consortium, Tees Valley Consortium, and the Regional Infrastructure Consortium.

 

Forum Review

The Strategic Third Sector Forum has recently undertaken a survey of its members to find out how they thought it was progressing. Overall members thought that the Forum was working to it aims and was a useful arena to network. But the recommendations suggest that the Forum should be more focused on improving funding conditions for the third sector, and championing the Compact at a regional level. A report and a summary on the  data are available.

 

Funding Framework

The Strategic Third Sector Forum carried out a survey amongst the region's infrastructure organisations in early 2009. This aimed to gather evidence of funding needs and provide a baseline of data on funding issues that affected the third sector during 2007/08. A full report of the data was produced and a summary is also available which highlighted that although infrastructure organisations had benefitted from a few major infrastructure funding programmes (Capacitybuilders and Big Lottery Fund BASIS) they were struggling to secure resources for core activity.

The second wave of the survey took place in October 2009 and has enabled us to develop a comparison summary report, and a full report. The evidence from fundraising activity in 2008/09 shows that infrastructure organisations are struggling to meet the new demands placed on them from the effects of the recession, and whilst many have funding secured for the next year, infrastructure funding is on the decline. There has been a reduction in numbers of organisations applying full cost recovery in their applications and over a third are relying on reserves to maintain services.

The Forum is keen to continue the survey at regular intervals and will keep tracking the trends in fundraising activity. This data will be used in recommendations for funders and commissioners through the regional funding action plan. The Forum will ensure that they continue to champion and share the added value of infrastructure services and will use this framework to demonstrate this.