Compact Voice's blog

Recently, Compact Voice concluded a piece of research looking at how local authorities in England spend on, and engage with, the voluntary sector.
 
We wanted to understand how transparent local authorities were able to be with their spending data, how they were consulting with the sector and if they were cutting funding to the sector disproportionately.

It’s Volunteers Week – I’m sure that hasn’t escaped your notice – but what I hadn’t realised is that Volunteers Week is now 30 years old.
 
With a milestone birthday for Volunteers Week and last year’s 15th anniversary of the Compact, it’s a good time to reflect on volunteering and the Compact. It’s also a good time for a sneaky peak at the future of volunteering, as well as taking the opportunity to celebrate the enormous contribution that volunteers make.

I have been working closely with different government departments for the last six months, and what has struck me the most is that a) departments are very big and as a result b) there is good partnership work happening somewhere in every department.
 
Sometimes, departments' willingness to include the voluntary sector isn’t promoted widely, it just happens as part of day to day activities, beneath the radar.

This February marked the one year anniversary of the Public Service (Social Value) Act, more commonly known as the Social Value Act.
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The picture is still very mixed across the country as to how local authorities and voluntary sector organisations understand social value and the Public Services (Social Value) Act.
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As a result, we've published a new, easy-to-understand guide to help organisations and Compact groups to get on board with it.

In this guest blog, Daniel O’Connor from WarpIT talks about his service (free for voluntary organisations) that allows them to take advantage of unwanted furniture, resources or kit for their offices.
 
The partnership WarpIT formed with Sunderland City Council was awarded the Compact Innovation Award at the 2013 Compact Awards.
 
Here, Daniel explains the benefits of the programme.

2013 has been a busy and eventful year for us all here at Compact Voice. 
 
We thought we'd say farewell to 2013 by looking back at some of the year's highlights.

We’ve recently done quite a lot of work with the Open Government Partnership (OGP). I wanted to take some time to explain to you all in this blog exactly what the OGP is and what it has to do with Compact Voice.