Volunteering gets £364k for infrastructure (From Your Local Guardian)

Volunteering gets £364k for infrastructure

10:08am Wednesday 15th February 2012 in Richmond By Christine Fleming

Richmond’s voluntary sector received a major boost after being awarded nearly £364,000 to spend on its work.

The Government funding, delivered via the non-lottery funded arm of the Big Lottery fund, will be used for Transforming Local Infrastructure (TLI) to provide better support for charities and other voluntary services.

It was hoped the grant would enable organisations to be more self-sufficient and make them less reliant on uncertain grant availability in future.

David Sidonio, chief executive of Richmond Council for Voluntary Service (RCVS), leaders of the borough’s TLI partnership, said it was fantastic to be given a share of the £30m national TLI grant pot.

He said it would enable them to work on real infrastructure changes to benefit residents.

He said: “We will be doing some future work on the property issue and will look at whether there are options to secure a building or build a building to provide affordable accommodation for different sector partners.

“What we want to do is create something which will be affordable and has good access that will bring together a range of services in shared accommodation.”

Mr Sidonio explained some money would be used to hire property experts to look at a centralised building where, for example, a resident could go to speak to Age UK to find out about benefit entitlement, RCVS about volunteering opportunities and seek other frontline service advice all in the same place.

Although the recently-awarded grant would not be enough to buy a building it could help the programme get under way.

Other areas the money will be focused on include looking at how to develop back office efficiencies for various charity and voluntary services perhaps by sharing services or negotiating contracts together, and working on forging stronger partnerships with the business sector to open up opportunities such as individual and philanthropic sponsorship programmes.

In theory the grant should allow the charity and voluntary sector to develop ways to become even more self supporting.

Mr Sidonio said: “It is about making the sector more sustainable and not reliant on funds and grants in future as we know that is contracting.

“It’s great [news] for this borough.”