Voluntary and Community Sector Forum

The Forum discussion at the Recovery Event in December 2020 was rich and extensive, providing a wealth of information, ideas and aspirations, which were summarised into a report with the following themes emerging:

1. To foster cross-sector, multi-agency networking to aid collaboration, develop and strengthen connections, share experience, information and resource and discuss common issues.
2. To support volunteer involving organisations with recruitment, management and retention of volunteers and to enable people from all walks of life to participate and engage in volunteering activities.
3. To aid the development of leadership, mental health and digital skills amongst staff, volunteers and individuals for the benefit of groups and organisations, beneficiaries and communities.

Wessex Community Action would like to invite you to the next meeting of the Voluntary and Community Sector Forum on 23rd February, where we will continue to consider and develop the themes that emerged from our last meeting in December and host space for any other conversations and new possibilities.

To do this well, we are taking a facilitation and participatory leadership orientated approach to gathering together for the next year. What this means on a practical level is that each meeting will now have a section at the beginning which focuses on arriving and sharing some stories of our lives, both from a personal perspective and a work perspective. This focus will allow us to build richer relationships in order that we can collaborate well together and give us a wider perspective on what is happening in our sector.

Following this collective networking, we will be using Open Space Technology, to create opportunities for self organised conversations. We will have 6-10 breakout spaces where any member of the community can host a conversation about a topic that matters to them right now.

To complete our time together we will come back to a larger group and share some of our learning from the conversations we have had and work together on a google jamboard to share any needs and requests that might be within our community. This jamboard and the learning from the conversations will be share more widely after the meeting.

We will leave the meeting open for a further 30minutes afterwards for any additional networking or connecting that you would like to do.

Please join us in exploring some new ways of collaborating together which will increase the potential for understanding, cross sector networking, collaboration and learning.