By Shareen Patel, policy and influencing offer at ACEVO
It’s been just over 9 months since the launch of the Civil Society Covenant. This short blog provides you with the latest developments.
Civil Society Council members
The members of the Civil Society Council were announced at the end of March. The Council was established to put partnership at the heart of government and members include leading voices from across the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector.
The Council will drive a new approach to partnership with civil society, overseeing the Covenant’s implementation at national and local level. It will provide a central forum to address issues that cut across government, including social cohesion and public service commissioning, and to identify opportunities for civil society to play a greater role in the design and delivery of policies and services.
ACEVO will continue to play our role ensuring that civil society leadership expertise and experience inform and support the meaningful partnership between government and civil society, and that our sector is supported to use the Covenant as a framework to drive forward the relationships we need. As ACEVO CEO, Jane Ide, put it on LinkedIn, ‘the Council will be an important part of making it real – but most definitely not the only one’.
Local Civil Society Covenant resources
The initial suite of the Local Civil Society Covenant resources, created by DCMS was published recently. The universal resources are designed to help local civil society and public organisations, including local authorities and Integrated Care Systems, discuss and implement the principles of the Covenant.
Included in the suite is a short overview, a fact sheet and a slide pack. The overview provides a high level snapshot of key information about the Covenant. The fact sheet provides a more detailed summary of the Covenant, why it matters to your organisation and its development. The slide pack is for local organisations to use in conversations internally and externally, when thinking about their partnership working practices.
The Partnerships Unit in No 10 are progressing with the creation of training resources on the Covenant and how its principles can be applied across government and civil society and ACEVO will continue to feed in civil society leadership perspective.
Local Covenant Partnerships (LCP) programme
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is investing £11.59m in the Local Covenant Partnerships (LCP) programme. The LCP Fund aims to invest targeted grant funding to support local areas to develop and implement new ‘local covenant partnership’ agreements in 15 local authority district areas across England to tackle local policy priorities and better meet the needs of communities.
Applications closed in February, and we await the announcement of the grant recipient(s).
Please do not hesitate to contact us at policy@acevo.org.uk to discuss this or any other influencing or policy issue important to you