This project responds to the need for a greater national picture of co-operation between statutory and voluntary agencies to promote and standardise funding advice. This includes building understanding of good practice, and ensuring that the need for services to the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector are aligned. The project will also seek to address the need for negotiation skills for the sector. The intended impact is that third sector organisational learning leads to appropriate choices about procurement for organisations and their communities.

The success rate of smaller voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises tendering for public services could be increased with improved information to plan for rapidly changing opportunities. This project aims to improve organisations’ chances of knowing when they are ready to secure contracts, by enabling their self assessment against new pilot benchmarks and pricing of services. This will also indicate how organisations are contributing to local authority floor targets.

One of the first steps for organisations considering trading is getting holistic, good quality advice and training. Currently voluntary organisations, social enterprise and especially community groups wishing to make the transition into successful trading/earned income find this difficult. This project aims to analyse relevant information on the range of start up issues – feasibility, risk, financing change as well as organisational development – and package it for different audiences, eg small BME groups, trustees, managers, to enable appropriate choices about diversifying. The training element will be aimed at infrastructure organisations working with Skills and Knowledge for Local Development (SKiLD) project.

To what extent have local authority grants decreased? Are contracts a viable alternative to grants? By commissioning comprehensive, contextualised and up-to-date research, we intend to clarify and map the current trends across England.

The aim is not only to identify the suspected decline, but also how the mix of restricted to unrestricted funding affects “core” ability to capacity build, particularly within local strategic partnerships.This will build on a previous report, ‘A directory of funding sources’ commissioned by the Hub. Do let us know if you’d like to participate as a regional case study.

Both funders and organisations which are funded seek mutually beneficial relationships yet this is not always a reality. The project will look at key issues such as pre-application advice, investment in overhead costs/support functions, sustainable funding provision, support of partnership funding and contractual relationships. An important aspect of this project will be to deliver a parallel set of outcomes tailored for hard to reach organisations, which will look at the value of a pilot framework to improve funding access.

The overall aim is to have greater evidence of third sector investment-fitness nationally, enabling them to make more robust cases to funders for grant and loan finance.

ACRE is leading this project commissioned by the Finance Hub. The Hub is responding to the need to carry out research to determine the success or otherwise of mainstreaming rural funding, and which types of support for front-line third sector rural groups are unlikely to retain capacity.

Establishing a Funding Advice National Network which starts to look at national skills and training needs aims to address the continued need to support the national skills agenda for funding advisers, working either in generic development or in specialist contexts.

Such an infrastructure body could respond to the need for permanently available funding skills throughout the country, which would seek to join up provision at local and district levels, to plug gaps and signpost effectively.

A broader, sustained body is needed to support community accountancy services in England. This project builds on existing work with CASH (Community Accountancy Self Help), in which we have identified a need to strengthen this national network and ensure its sustainability. The increasing demand for community accountants needs to be met with an improved infrastructure for the profession.