Earlier this year, Community Foundation North East published the North East findings from the long-running Third Sector Trends study, providing a wealth of insight into the region’s VCSE sector. A new interactive website has been launched, making the data more accessible and easier to explore at national, regional, and North East Mayoral Strategic Authority levels.
In this blog, VONNE introduces the new resource and highlights why it’s worth exploring. We also spotlight several themes of particular relevance to the North East VCSE sector, policymakers and funders, combining the data with what organisations are telling us in practice.
Finally, we consider why these trends matter and how understanding them can help strengthen the role of the VCSE sector in shaping better outcomes for communities and supporting the region’s long-term prosperity.
First launched by Northern Rock Foundation in 2008, the Third Sector Trends study is now hosted by Community Foundation North East and led by Dr Tony Chapman of Durham University.
The study provides a long-term view of the VCSE sector, tracking how organisations respond to social, economic and policy change over time. It explores a wide range of themes, including volunteering, income, partnerships, influence and impact.
For VCSE organisations, this offers an opportunity to benchmark individual experiences against the wider landscape and identify shared challenges and opportunities. For policymakers and funders, it provides valuable insight into the experiences and perspectives of the VCSE sector, helping to inform future investment, commissioning and policy decisions.
What does Third Sector Trends tell us about the North East VCSE Sector?
The sector is ready to deliver, but barriers to access remain.
The report highlights high levels of public sector engagement across the North East, with a strong foundation of organisations already delivering public services and many others interested in doing so. This is underpinned by a culture of partnership working that appears stronger than the national picture, with higher levels of both informal relationships and formal collaboration demonstrating the sector’s connectivity and capacity to work across organisational boundaries.
However, barriers to accessing public service contracts remain, with around one in six organisations reporting that they would like to bid for contracts but face obstacles or require additional support to do so.
This suggests that the North East VCSE sector has both the appetite and the infrastructure needed to play a significant role in public service delivery, but that commissioning and procurement processes do not always enable organisations to participate effectively.
VONNE’s research on the North East Economic Inactivity Trailblazer heard organisations across the region describe local government procurement processes as complex and resource intensive. Such practices can favour larger, more established providers, while short bidding windows can further exclude smaller organisations without the dedicated necessary capacity, and lead to overreliance on already-existing partnerships. Where these challenges extend into delivery arrangements, they can reinforce delivery models dominated by larger prime contractors, with smaller VCSE organisations participating as subcontractors or informal partners, frequently with limited influence and insecure funding.
More proportionate contract sizes and flexible procurement processes could help commissioners engage a broader and more diverse range of providers, creating services that are both sustainable and responsive to local need. Larger organisations can offer scale, financial resilience and delivery capacity, while smaller, community-based organisations bring deep local insight, trusted relationships and strong connections.
We’ve seen the potential of partnership working first-hand through the VCSE Partnership Programme Assura project, which brought together place-based and thematic organisations from across the region to shape a funding bid. An existing structure, the partnership was able to evolve the focus of the bid from service delivery to addressing wider systemic challenges facing the sector. Although the initial funding has now ended, support from public sector health partners has enabled organisations to continue to test the model on a smaller scale, with ambitions to expand it across the Integrated Care System.
The sector has a seat at the table, but limited influence.
The findings also highlight a gap between being engaged and having meaningful influence.
Whilst most respondents felt that public sector organisations value the contribution of VCSE organisations and keep them informed about relevant issues and policy developments, considerably fewer felt they are involved in shaping and implementing policy. A majority also felt that their expertise and views are not acted upon when consultation takes place.
VCSE organisations are often valued for their role in delivering services and supporting communities, however they are not consistently considered as strategic partners in policy development and decision-making. As a result, opportunities to draw on lived experience, community insight and place-based knowledge can be missed.
A similar message emerged during a recent discussion VONNE hosted between the Tees Valley Combined Authority and voices from the regional VCSE sector, as part of the development of the region's business support plan. Participants highlighted the challenges of being involved late in programme design and emphasised the sector's role not only as a recipient of business support, but also as a provider of expertise and insight.
The discussion highlighted an appetite to move beyond consultation towards collaborative action. Creating opportunities for VCSE organisations to contribute at the earliest stages of policymaking would help ensure that community experiences and needs are reflected from the outset. It would also enable decision-makers to draw on the sector's expertise and develop more effective responses to local needs.
Organisations trust infrastructure to represent their interests.
The Third Sector Trends 2025 study finds that trust in infrastructure organisations to influence and advocate on behalf of the sector is notably higher in the North East than across England and Wales. This suggests that infrastructure bodies are viewed as credible representatives of the sector's interests, translating local insight into strategic influence and playing an important bridging role between communities, frontline organisations and decision-makers.
Third Sector Trends itself forms part of this infrastructure. By providing robust evidence about the scale and experiences of the VCSE sector, it supports more informed conversations about the sector's strengths, challenges and opportunities.
The importance of infrastructure becomes clear where it is weaker. Without strong mechanisms for coordination and representation, the sector can find it harder to establish shared priorities, engage with decision-makers and attract investment. Strong infrastructure helps address these challenges by creating a collective voice and supporting more effective engagement across local systems.
Together, local and regional infrastructure organisations create a two-way flow of intelligence and evidence. They help ensure that community experiences inform strategic priorities while communicating policy developments, opportunities and learning back to the sector. Continued investment in infrastructure, alongside regular engagement between policymakers and sector representatives, can support collaboration and ensure decisions are grounded in the realities of communities and frontline organisations.
Why do the findings matter?
The North East is seeing continued change in how decisions are made at a regional level, with devolution creating opportunities for greater regional influence over areas such as housing, education, employment and economic development. These developments present significant opportunities for the North East VCSE sector, which is well placed to help deliver on forthcoming regional priorities alongside the North East Mayoral Strategic Authority and Tees Valley Combined Authority.
The key themes explored above highlight a sector that is well connected, engaged and ready to deliver. They point to strong foundations for partnership working, a clear appetite for greater involvement in shaping policy, and high levels of trust in local and regional infrastructure organisations.
As new funding and partnership opportunities emerge, including initiatives such as the Community Impact Fund and Local Covenant Partnerships Fund, policymakers, funders and the VCSE sector have an opportunity to build on these strengths while addressing the barriers that currently limit participation and influence.
This means recognising not only the organisations that provide support and services, but also the connections, trust and knowledge that enable the sector to work collectively and influence change. These assets create the conditions for collaboration, to understand what works, where gaps remain, and how outcomes for communities can be improved.
The new online resource from Community Foundation North East and Third Sector Trends brings this evidence together in an accessible format, providing data, insight and practical learning to inform future policy, commissioning and partnership development across the region.
The resource was launched at a webinar where VONNE's Chief Executive Martin Brookes, shared his reflections on the findings. You can watch the webinar here and explore the new online resource here.