Community Matters has warned its members that its future is in question after being left out of the Cabinet Office’s new strategic partner programme.

Yesterday, the Cabinet Office announced it had chosen nine organisations, including Acevo and NCVO, to be part of its final three-year strategic partner programme.

Community Matters, which failed in its bid with Acre, has written a letter to its members warning that its future is under threat as the strategic partner grant was a vital element of its budget:

“This grant would have been our core funding for the next three years,” it says. “As things stand, our core funding will end nine days from now and although Community Matters will continue to exist for at least another year and will ensure that we protect member services throughout this period, our future beyond that is now in question.”

In 2009/10 the strategic partner grant made up 23 per cent of Community Matters' income. It received £261,603.

In the letter, Community Matters also urges its members to write to minister for civil society Nick Hurd to complain that the grassroots voluntary-led community sector deserves a voice to government.

David Tyler, chief executive of Community Matters, told Civil Society that the government said it was keen to encourage volunteer-led, local action yet did not have an organisation representing this group as a strategic partner:

“The grassroots community sector represents two-thirds of the civil society sector and it does not have a voice to government now.”

Other snubbed strategic partners are also complaining that the new strategic partner programme does not represent the breadth of the civil society sector.

Toby Blume, chief executive of Urban Forum which also lost its strategic partner grant, has complained that the new programme appears to have directed funding towards the larger organisations at the expense of those who represent the smaller interests and organisations.

Blume, who made the comments in a blog, noted that the Association of Charitable Foundations and the Community Foundation Network were selected as strategic partners:

“I admire the work of both organisations,” says Blume. “But their members are charitable trusts and community foundations – organisations with combined assets of many billions of pounds. If the membership bodies for organisations with these level of resources are (to use OCS’s derogatory phrase) ‘dependent on the state for funding’ then what prospect to the rest of us have for sustaining ourselves?”

Blume also said it was striking that no equalities organisations were part of the new strategic partner programme.

“There were already huge gaps in the list of existing strategic partners – no partners representing the interests of disabled groups for example – but there were a number whose focus is on particular equalities groups,” he says.

“The decision not to fund the likes of Voice4Change England, Women’s Resource Centre, LGBT Consortium and the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services makes a mockery of OCS’s stated aims.”

Voice4Change England will write to the OCS asking it to explain why no equality groups will remain as partners.