Issue 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, a new, quarterly, in person ‘action network’ is being scoped. 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 VCFSE 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 extra payment of £5,984.00 has arisen due to the fact that this work was originally intended to run for 10 weeks but has instead continued to run at half a day a week between 16/10/2024 and 31/03/2025. This is owing to the complexity of setting up a new GM Action Network that fits the terms of reference envisaged by the VRU’s strategy implementation plan and sufficiently embeds the voice of lived experience into the work of the network.