Convene & connect
We will bring people together and convene meetings, events, workshops, training programmes and hackathons to connect people, share information, build skills and a shared understanding on common issues.
We will seek to build a consensus about how best to tackle and address critical issues for the sector. In bringing organisations and stakeholders together, we will create a unified and strong voice that can be directed and amplified to best effect for Londoners, while also sharing knowledge between and across organisations.
Evidence-based practice
We will commission and conduct research to generate new knowledge and insight and collect, collate and critically evaluate good practice to build a robust evidence base that demonstrates what works and why for civil society.
Many organisations can operate alone and have developed strong ‘rules of thumb’ for what works. This can become good practice, but often we do not understand how or why it works – it is experiential and developed through years of practice. We rarely have the time, resources or funding to critically evaluate what we are doing to understand what works and why. We will work with organisations to collect, collate and critically evaluate good practice to build a robust evidence base that demonstrates what works and why. We will also research existing literature to identify evidence-based practice as well as conducting our own new research in partnership with the sector, or with established research bodies and the sector. Our primary focus for evidence-based practice will be to demonstrate the value, importance and impact of civil society.
Speaking up & changing attitudes
We will engage and influence decision-makers, funders and policymakers so that they understand the importance of civil society and the vital role infrastructure plays in underpinning civil society.
Using the knowledge and evidence that we gather by bringing people together and through our systematic research to build evidence of the value of the sector we will be in a position to demonstrate this clearly to funders and decision makers. It will be vital that we speak up and engage with policy and decision makers and funders so that they have access to this evidence, understand it and are influenced to be more supportive of local VCS organisations and civil society more broadly. We will have targeted programmes of engagement and influencing to achieve a real shift in attitude towards civil society infrastructure from policymakers, businesses and funders so that the concerns and priorities of Londoners are heard. We will use our connections and evidence base to shape and inform new policies and funding priorities.
Below is a list of a few of our activities we carry out to meet our objectives: