THEMES:
Health System
Infrastructure
The Project Brief
Making VCS infrastructure support more sustainable for City and Hackney’s Integrated Care System
PROCESS:
Community Engagement Participatory Research Facilitation
The Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) doesn’t have the same level of infrastructure as the public/statutory sector. In City and Hackney, Hackney CVS is funded by the local authority to provide infrastructure support to VCS organisations - supporting them to develop as organisations and bringing them together to share information and work in partnership.
In 2020, Hackney CVS received a five-year grant from the health system to run City and Hackney’s VCS Enabler, which provides infrastructure support to VCS organisations working towards positive health outcomes. The VCS Enabler aims to integrate the VCS into the local health and social care system, building understanding between the VCS and statutory sector and identifying opportunities to collaborate - so that the VCS and healthcare system can work synergistically to tackle the present health and social inequalities.
Infrastructure support that is specifically focused on health is key for the new integrated care system (ICS) to work: the VCS is an equal partner in the new ICS but VCS organisations lack the infrastructure needed to navigate statutory services. However, there are many different visions for how the infrastructure support should look. Hackney CVS was recently notified that funding at the current level will not be able to continue after 2025. To secure its future, the funder requests a sustainability plan for long-term sustainability, before further funding will be released.
Our Approach
The Civil Society Consulting (CSC) team been commissioned to drive the development of the sustainability plan, developing solutions co-productively with all the VCS Enabler’s beneficiaries and stakeholders.
Impact
The CSC team are excited to share a compelling sustainability plan by the end of July 2023, which addresses the present concerns and secures a winning model for supporting City and Hackney’s VCS to be ‘equal partners’ in the new ICS.
Having carried out a series of ‘blue sky thinking’ and ‘plan development’ workshops with representatives from the health system and the VCS, CSC will assess the opportunities for strengthening and streamlining the current model, presenting three options (bronze, silver and gold) for how the VCS Enabler can look going forward.
The iterative process utilises the findings from an existing independent evaluation of the VCS Enabler that incorporates input from over 40 organisations.