The Civic Partnership

In 2007 voluntary and community sector representatives from the LPSBs worked with Council and PCT officers to develop the successful bid to the Treasury's Invest to Save programme proposal which secured £619,000 funding over three years from April 2007.

The project was called the Civic Partnership and it used an action research approach to explore the barriers to effective joint working between the public sector and VCS. This was to help Kirklees to develop more effective people and systems in both sectors - to make a reality of genuine partnership and collaboration. It also aimed to overcome the barriers - such as complex processes and rules and different standards and systems operating in different parts of the public sector - to make things better for service users and organisations.

The Civic Partnership programme will include:

• The Partnership Academy - pairs of public and voluntary sector managers working together to develop their own skills and explore new ways of creating and delivering services collaboratively. This was a 15 month training and development programme for managers commissioning or delivering public services.
• Pilot case studies - based on Local Area Agreement priorities - to explore new ways of public service delivery with the VCS or barriers to VCS capacity.
• Aims to create a Clearing House Model - a single entry point for voluntary sector organisations seeking and delivering public sector commissions.

The Civic Partnership had a full time project manager who reported to a multi-agency project team and programme board.

The Civic Partnership has now concluded and a final independent evaluation of the project is currently being considered by the Kirklees Partnership Voluntary and Community Sector Programme Board. It will be uploaded onto the site in due course.

The independent evaluation was carried out by the Icarus Consultancy. Brief conclusions from their report was that the Civic Partnership programme has, through its willingness to explore new ideas and challenge established thinking, generated, to a modest degree, people and organisations who are working differently and which understand more about their counterparts in the other sector. Systematic change linked to commissioning is beginning, and the contribution of the Civic Partnership to the process has been timely in stimulating the debate over that change.

The glimpses from within the Civic Partnership programme of shared understandings across the sectors, creativity and a willingness to engage constructively around need and the best means of meeting it, point to the potential for the shared goal which was proposed by the people involved in the Partnership Academy - and that this might be realised with continued flexibility and hard work.

Making it Personal - Civic Partnership Training Programme 13 January to 24 February 2010

Don't miss this one-off opportunity to take part in an exciting programme of free training and development for the voluntary and community sector in Kirklees. The aim of 'Making it personal' is to help VCO's as they work towards becoming more resilient and sustainable in a fast-changing operating environment. The programme has a very practical focus and the idea is that participants will leave confident and motivated to turn theory and practice into real action.

Making it Personal programme brochure (305Kb PDF)

Making it Personal programme evaluation report (248Kb PDF)

For more information on the Civic Partnership contact:

Andrew Pennington
Assistant Director
Children & Young People
Telephone: 01484 225284
Email: andrew.pennington@kirklees.gov.uk