Decision details

The key focus of the VRU’s Community Led Programmes 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.
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.

As part of the recently approved implementation plan for the Greater Than Violence strategy, the previous Community Led Delivery group (having met monthly virtually) will now be replace by a quarterly, in person ‘action network’. The network will transform the VRU’s approach to working with and for communities. Given the objectives of the Greater Than Violence Strategy, broad representation is a pre-requisite, including substantial VCSE voices. This would be known as the VRU Action Network. The learning from this will be fed into the governance board and back into the programme as a whole. The recommendations from the 2023 'Experts by Experience' programme are ultimately achieved via this project.

The GM VRU are seeking to fund Bolton Community Voluntary Sector (CVS) the amount of £2,580 to support development of a VRU Action Network, costed at 10 weeks of support provided by x2 colleagues at Bolton CVS to be paid via standard GMCA purchase order procedure (not grant funding).

To date, the GM VRU have awarded Bolton CVS a total of £3,655,000 from the 2020/21, 21/22, 22/23, 23/24 and 24/25 Serious Violence Funding (and Deputy Mayor Investment Fund) to support the Community-Led Programme. This award will bring the total funding amount to £3,657,580.