Greta Brunskill, VCSE Health & Wellbeing Research Partnership Coordinator at VONNE, reflects and shares an update about all that’s been happening at VONNE to support VCSE organisations and researchers to work together.
The last 6 months have continued to be a very busy and fruitful time around the two main strands of my VCSE Health & Wellbeing Research Partnership Coordinator role – building capacity for greater VCSE research partnership working, and connecting and supporting VCSE and research partners.
Together with National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) partners and Cumbria CVS, VONNE have held two events to share and encourage adoption of the NIHR Community Engagement Toolkit which focuses on how researchers and communities can work successfully together. Read more about these events held in July in Newcastle and the most recently in Carlisle this week.
Following a successful pilot of an introductory session on health & wellbeing research and evaluation for VCSE organisations with researchers from our region’s NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC), we will be holding this training again in the new year, which we hope will reach a wider range of VCSE organisations. Together with colleagues at VONNE, I have also been involved in developing a ‘What is the VCSE sector?’ session to help research, health and other partners develop their understanding of the sector. Further details of both sessions will be shared soon across our Health and Wellbeing Network. If you’re not on our mailing list to receive our news you can sign up here.
The biggest chunk of my working week is spent sharing opportunities with and connecting potential partners. Over the last 6 months this has involved conversations with VCSE and research organisations across the region with shared interests in diverse health and care topics, such as supporting families in need, developing effective public health messaging, and creating new interventions to help prevent stroke and dementia. There’s never a dull day, and I’m privileged to learn about and support so much fantastic research happening in our region.
As you can imagine, offering a regional point of contact to help VCSE organisations and academic researchers to connect and work together means my email inbox can get rather busy! To help streamline my response to requests for support, I am happy to share that you can now get in touch via an online enquiry form with details of the support you’re looking for. Please use the relevant enquiry form for either VCSE organisations or research organisations/researchers and I will be in touch.
To learn more about VONNE's VCSE Health and Wellbeing Research Partnerships work visit our VCSE Research Partnerships webpage.