young people volunteering at food bank at community centre

How has coronavirus affected the resilience of your charity?

Published: 29/04/21 | Categories: Uncategorised, Author: Russell Todd

The pandemic meant many organisations have lost income and been forced to cut services, or close entirely. Russell Todd of Grow Social Capital CIC wants to know how the sector can rediscover its resilience. Read on to find out how to get involved.

We know that many charities and voluntary sector organisations have had a tough time in the last year. Income has fallen, need has increased, services have had to change and many public services have been so busy tackling the pandemic that their usual services have had to pause.

Following discussion with our members, WCVA knows that this has changed how resilient many organisations feel. We also know that many organisations have had to re-consider what it is that makes them resilient in the first place. As the world changes once this pandemic is over, WCVA wants to make sure the resilience of the voluntary sector grows from the experience.

That is why we have formed a partnership with Grow Social Capital CIC to engage with the voluntary sector about what is important in making an organisation resilient – and to recommend to WCVA and the public sector how they can support this.

In the initial stage, Grow Social Capital will be contacting as many organisations as possible. They’ll be doing this through a survey, a series of interviews, and online focus groups and you are invited to get involved in whichever way suits you. To do this, please contact  hello@growsocialcapital.org.uk. (You can do so in either Welsh or English).

We will specifically be seeking to engage the widest range of organisations – from the large to the small, across a wide range of activities, and from the length and breadth of Wales. What makes an organisation and its community resilient? This is what we want to find out, and discover lessons for all of us to learn from and grow. There will be many valuable insights for us in the sector to learn from each other. .

Between us, we will draw the voluntary sector’s views on resilience together, especially focussing on:

  • contributing to a helpful definition of resilience, which has consensus amongst the sector,
  • setting out what we know from existing evidence of what does and does not work in relation to building resilience,
  • generating peer to peer discussions on what it means for organisations in Wales, and
  • developing recommendations for who needs to do what now to build sector’s resilience.

With your input we can grow stronger to create a voluntary sector that can continue its work well into the future.

If you want to get in touch with us about this project, please drop us an email on policy@wcva.cymru. You can use either Welsh or English to do so.

Grow Social Capital is a Cardiff-based social enterprise. It works to generate greater togetherness in communities to create change and build greater cohesion.