Professor Catherine Leyshon offers her insights on the University’s partnership with Volunteer Cornwall and the Volunteer Sector Forum, focusing on a recent study conducted for this project using the Bridging Communities Fund.
The University of Exeter’s Social Innovation Group (SIG) has worked in collaboration with Volunteer Cornwall and Volunteer Sector Forum for over 10 years. Our projects have aimed to support local communities in Cornwall with pressing societal challenges, such as climate change, health inequalities, and health and social care provision.
Many of our projects would not have materialised without the voluntary sector’s efforts, compassion, and care, and the varied forms of voluntary action need to be acknowledged. Individuals who give their time to a neighbour, groups with no funding that run village activities, and charities that bridge the gap between larger organizations and the volunteer sector are all part of an ecosystem of care that supports communities. However, the smaller yet important organisms in this ecosystem – such as the volunteer who pops over to check on a neighbour each day – seem to be overlooked when the voluntary sector’s contributions to communities are assessed. Consequently, we came together and applied for Bridging Communities Funding to co-develop a method for listening to the voluntary sector’s voice and needs. In essence, we set out to find a way to understand and support the entire ecosystem of voluntary support in Cornwall.
We used Bridging Communities Funding to evaluate what prior efforts had been made to understand the voluntary sector. The funding supported time to review data, as well as local and national reports concerning the voluntary sector. At key moments, the partnership came together to discuss how to refine existing surveys and qualitative methods that aimed to define the voluntary sector. Decisions around how to better design surveys and our ‘on-the-ground’ methods (conducted within communities) were taken collaboratively.
*This figure does not cover ALL charities. Charities were included based on the data that we were able to source.
Importantly, the funding resourced time to ensure that we could discuss and respond to emergent ideas as a team. For example, in an early meeting, we discussed how organising voluntary sector data spatially would give us an indication of places in Cornwall that were not being heard. SIG processed relevant data using Geographic Information System (GIS) software and shared the findings with the rest of the partnership. This visual information – see figure 1 – helped us to decide where to test the method that we develop.
Essentially, we were given the opportunity to reflect on existing data and methods collectively and this helped us to plan how we can work together in the future. As a partnership, we have secured further funds to help us to test, refine, and share our co-developed methods.
We have also garnered interest around our work from national organisations, e.g. National Association for Voluntary and Community Action (NAVCA). We hope that this added interest will enable our co-developed method to be adopted and used more widely.
Our next steps involve working together to test and refine the method that we scoped during our Bridging Communities funded project and ensure the delivery of a sustainable approach. We remain committed to ensuring that the voluntary sector’s voice is heard and supported inclusively and holistically. Overall, a closer relationship between the University of Exeter and Cornwall’s voluntary sector is of strategic importance to the county. Our work aims in the long term to contribute to an equitable dialogue between the sector and HE researchers. Encouragingly, county-level discussions are being held around creating a formal body that would ensure voluntary sector knowledges, skills and memories are retained, valued, and shared.