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Capacity benefits

Finance | Gareth Jones | 1 Mar 2006

ChangeUp, the government's project to build capacity and infrastructure in the voluntary sector, has been a matter of some controversy since its announcement in June 2004. Over eighteen months and almost £200 million later Capacity Builders, the organisation established to manage the programme at arms length from government and set to formally launch in April, faces some difficult questions.

Never shy of stirring things up, Directory of Social Change recently conducted a survey on people's views about ChangeUp. It received over 500 responses of which only 19 per cent said that they thought ChangeUp would make the sector more effective. Over a third said that they did not think that it would work and another third had no knowledge of it. If ChangeUp is to be successful then engaging with a sector that is both aware and supportive of its aims is crucial.

Other striking views emerged such as ChangeUp being just another government department by proxy and that while a very good idea in principle it will need to be properly funded and resourced in order for it to make any real difference. You could say the same thing about the Charity Commission, which must wonder what it has to do to get a pay rise out of Parliament, but that's another story!

These are all issues that Capacity Builders' new chief executive Simon Hebditch will be eager to get his teeth into, and he was very keen to be interviewed by Charity Finance prior to taking up the role at the beginning of February.

However, in an inauspicious start, it took many minutes and several dead ends through the Home Office's labyrinthine phone system to actually find anyone who was even aware of his existence a week after he started. Even then, he didn't have a contact phone number or email address. So much for building capacity and improved infrastructure.

I am sure Hebditch will readily and ably give his views on the challenges ahead over the next couple of months and we look forward to presenting them. In the meantime, let's hope that the largely negative reaction to the whole programme is not a sign that this will all prove to be a great waste of time. And money.

Double jeopardy

However hard to find the new ceo of ChangeUp may currently be, there was no difficulty spotting Stuart Etherington at NCVO's recent annual conference.

Having delivered Labour rising star David Miliband to speak on new Labour's new big idea, double devolution, Etherington cruised the Brewery pressing flesh with the growing number of people who are finally recognising the immense skill with which NCVO has lined up the government to a voluntary sector agenda.

So why the angry buzz around the mid morning coffee cups after golden boy Miliband had slipped away in his Jag for the short cruise back to his billet at ODPM? Could it be the mismatch between Miliband's rhetoric and the current realities of delegates' experiences?

With large chunks of ChangeUp money flowing through NCVO coffers via the four hubs it is effectively controlling, the gnomes of Kings Cross are now really settled in the voluntary sector driving seat. This money is supposed to help create the infrastructure and accountability improvements that the proposed flow of 'power to the people' will need in order to be sustainable.

Having cornered the lion's share of the funding and the political will to go with it, the problems for NCVO will come if it fails to embrace the many partnerships it needs to make ChangeUp actually work. Rightly or wrongly, there is a strong impression in the wider world that NCVO prefers to ignore anything that it hasn't invented. The message to NCVO should be loud and clear -  relax folks, you've done the hard work, now let the rest of us help take the strain!

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Directory: Capacitybuilders | Directory of Social Change (DSC) | National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO)
Who's Who: Simon Hebditch | Sir Stuart Etherington