NICVA work on Support Services

Strategy for Support Services

As part of Positive Steps, DSD committed to “lead on the development of a strategy for support services which will address benchmarks and performance standards for support organisations to help ensure consistency of service provision.”

NICVA wants to ensure that the voluntary and community sector itself participates in the process of designing the most appropriate support services, taking into account the existing structure of regional, sub-regional and thematic network bodies. A sub-committee of the NICVA Executive Committee is has been leading on the work on this for almost a year. Four meetings were recently held across Northern Ireland to agree a process to take the work forward, linking it to the forthcoming changes under the Review of Public Administration. This subgroup group has just been expanded into a steering group containing representatives from the wider sector, both from network/infrastructure bodies and from organisations using network services.

The full steering group (27kb)

NICVA intends to carry out a piece of work over the summer which will consult the wider sector on what support needs are and how and where they should be delivered. In addition, NICVA’s research team will undertake some in-depth case studies to examine the complex mix of services that organisations use. The intention is to feed the sector’s ideas into DSD in the autumn.