Building a Stronger Civil Society

This document has three objectives: 1. Section one sets out the scale and nature of the opportunities being made available to civil society organisations as part of the Government’s wider reform agenda, through empowering communities, opening up public services and promoting social action. 2. Section two spells out some of the practical measures that the Government is taking to support the sector to realise these opportunities in the immediate future and over the longer term. 3. In the consultation document published alongside this strategy today, we are also asking for your views on how infrastructure organisations can best be improved to help develop new skills, partnerships and organisational models so that frontline organisations can seize the opportunities that lie ahead.

Building a Stronger Civil Society
Consultation document

 



1. Empowering communities: giving local councils and neighbourhoods more power to take decisions and shape their area.
2. Opening up public services: the Government’s public service reforms will enable charities, social enterprises, private companies and employee-owned co-operatives to compete to offer people high quality services;

3. Promoting social action: encouraging and enabling people from all walks of life to play a more active part in society, and promoting more volunteering and philanthropy.

These reforms will radically re-cast the relationship between the state and charities, social enterprises and voluntary and community groups over the coming years. They will give the sector a huge range of new opportunities to shape and provide innovative, bottom-up services where expensive state provision has failed. Promoting social action will make an important contribution to creating the step change in attitudes to giving both time and money that will transform the ability of the sector to improve people’s lives. New opportunities will present themselves to work together with the business community and philanthropists to make a significant difference to local grass roots organisations. However, the Government recognises that these opportunities will not emerge overnight and that to take advantage of them the sector will need some support We also recognise that the action that Government is taking to reduce the deficit could mean a reduction in income for many civil society organisations. This will be particularly challenging for organisations who have a high level of dependence on state income and low reserves.