Decision details

In August 2019, the Mayor announced during the GM Reform Board that GM’s approach to tackling violence would be “community-led” in line with the GMs’ ambitious public service reform programme, which led to the establishment of the GM Community-Led Programme (CLP).

The key focus of the CLP is ensuring that young people and stakeholders in a specific locality or place come together, focussing on a strength based approach in the pilot sites to identify what work is already taking place , what gaps may exist and what the opportunities might be to address these gaps. Key to this approach is harnessing and building on existing strengths and capacity from within the community to develop projects and activities..

The programme is co-ordinated by a VCSE Sector Strategic Lead (Michael Phipps) who is working with Public Sector and VCSE sector partners to deliver the programme and is based within the GM VRU.

The VCSE Sector Strategic Lead is responsible for maximising the contribution of the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector in leading a series of place-based responses to violence affecting young people in those areas most in need of help and in achieving better outcomes for residents in those communities. The VRU Community-Led Delivery Group has been formed to oversee and scrutinise the overall programme of work, including the spending plan.

This programme is about working with communities to find solutions to problems that exist in their area. Investment is important and there is funding available to develop and deliver solutions that communities define and collectively agree on. The key priority is about building trust with communities and acting upon their challenges and ideas through prioritising a range of shared actions.

To date, the CLP is operating in all 10 areas of GM.

The decision is that:

The GM VRU are seeking to award additional funding to Bolton Community Voluntary Sector (CVS) to the value of £1,000,000 by way of Grant funding, to support in the delivery and administration of the VRU’s Community-Led Pilots Programme on behalf of 10 GM. The figure is broken down below.

£100,000 is to be awarded to each Community Led Programme area (ten areas in total) in accordance with the following timescales, commensurate with the current position of the programme in each area:

Manchester, Bolton, Salford, Oldham & Bury will receive this funding award in financial year 2023-24
Tameside, Wigan, Trafford, Stockport and Rochdale will receive this funding award in financial year 2024-25

This is an additional funding award over and above the existing VRU funding that has been provided for Community led Programmes from core VRU funding. This funding announcement ensures those programmes currently in year 2 can run for a further 2 years until March 2025, whilst those programmes currently in year 1 can run for an additional third year until March 2025.

To date, the GM VRU have awarded Bolton CVS a total of £1,655,000 from the 2020/21, 21/22 & 22/23 Serious Violence Funding to support the Community-Led Programme. This will bring the total funding amount to £2,655,000, with £1,655,000 funded from the VRU’s core Home Office grant, and £1,000,000 coming from the Deputy Mayor’s Investment Fund.