Scottish Government

ANNEX B
INTERNAL CHALLENGES FOR THE SECTOR (IDENTIFIED BY SCVO)

In addition to the challenges identified within the body of the document there are also challenges that the sector faces internally that inhibit its capacity to play out its full part in the vision. ⁴

Key challenges are in the areas of:

• More effective governance and leadership
• Ensuring efficiency while protecting diversity
• Partnership working (within the sector and with the public sector)

More effective governance

• Strengthening the skills of the sector's trustees for effective stewardship of voluntary organisations
• Improving standards of accountability and transparency within the voluntary sector and dealing with changes in regulation
• Meeting the requirements of compliance with statutory regulations while minimising disruption and information overload to the sector

This requires a renewed focus by the sector's intermediaries to build strong partnerships with local and central government and to ensure appropriate support, information and training to voluntary organisations and their trustees.

Ensuring efficiency but not at the cost of diversity

• Building on and valuing the sector's diversity to ensure innovation, participation and a level playing field
• Co-operation, pooling resources, de-duplicating where necessary
• More strategic use of new funding opportunities, tackling risk aversion

The sector's intermediaries and higher profile organisations have a key role to play in facilitating this discussion within the sector, as well as developing the ways in which it presents itself to the general public and other sectors. The sectors intermediaries have an important role in creating a climate within the sector which recognises that all have a role to play - government and the voluntary sector.

Learning from other approaches

• Building more links and sharing learning from other countries
• Building more links with the private and public sectors and other parts of civil society to build effective partnerships that cut across traditional silos
• Taking a longer term view of how the sector's role needs to develop in a changing Scotland

The sector needs to take a lead in building longer-lasting strategic links both across sectors in Scotland as well as with others outside Scotland to UK, Europe and beyond in order to make sure its activities stay relevant and focused, and to build-in its own contribution to the policy-making challenge.

The sector's awareness of the challenges it faces is still short-term and focused on immediate survival such as securing funding, securing staff or volunteers and compliance with government regulations. Efficiency, managing growth, linking with others and ensuring quality are still secondary concerns.

Meeting longer-term challenges as outlined above will therefore require more security for the sector through better and more efficient funding and a greater sharing of ideas and insights across the sector and more focused pragmatic engagement by the sector too on furthering voluntary/public sector engagement particularly at the local level. High profile government initiatives on their own will not be adequate to resolve these issues. The full participation of the sector is also needed.

Evidence

Based on a survey carried out by SCVO in December 2004 to a highly representative sample of 2000 voluntary organisations (800 responses), the top challenges that are of concern to voluntary organisations are known to us and are summarised in the table below.

These findings confirm that securing funding is the primary concern for voluntary organisations and depending on the size of the organisations, staffing issues or supply of volunteers is a key challenge. However, it also suggests that compliance with government regulation has become a shared concern for voluntary organisations, whatever their size.

Top challenges by size of organisation