Voluntary and Community Sector Infrastructure and Support

Overview

The Department for Communities is the lead government department for supporting the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector (VCSE).

We are also the lead funder of strategic capacity building in the Sector in Northern Ireland.  We fund a range of organisations to provide practical support to staff, volunteers, boards and committees.  We call this type of support ‘infrastructure support’ as we consider that collectively it helps to sustain the infrastructure of the VCSE sector.

Infrastructure support can be described as the combination of capacity, skills, physical resources and structures which support voluntary and community organisations in serving their communities and delivery services. Infrastructure support also refers to the organisations and networks that exist to help organisations to achieve their missions.

We are currently reviewing the needs and priorities for voluntary and community organisations and volunteers to ensure that our support is contributing to a sustainable, innovative and vibrant sector. 

This survey will help us to understand how best we can continue to support the Sector.  We will be developing a refreshed policy framework to inform future commissioning and funding of supports.

It is an opportunity for you to tell us where your organisation is at, in terms of its capacity and what you might need going forward in terms of infrastructure support. We are interested in whether different types of organisations have different support needs and what your experience has been in either accessing and/or delivering infrastructure support.

This survey is only one part of our engagement.  Insights from this survey will be used to provide a snapshot of sectoral support. We will use these insights to dig deeper and gather more detailed information, through future engagement sessions with people working and volunteering in the sector over the coming months.  

Please check the Department’s website or contact us HERE for information on how else you can get involved.