Taking risks the safe way: risk management and insurance practices of Ontario's Voluntary Sector

Taking Risks the Safe Way was developed as a knowledge‐building tool and research reference for nonprofit organizations across Ontario. The contents of this document will also guide the work of government in supporting capacity‐building among voluntary and community organizations, and provide a valuable resource for the insurance industry in serving the nonprofit sector. Keywords: CVSS, Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies, Working Paper Series,TRSM, Ted Rogers School of Management Citation

Taking risks the safe way: risk management and insurance practices of Ontario's Voluntary Sector

Taking Risks the Safe Way was developed as a knowledge‐building tool and research reference for nonprofit organizations across Ontario. The contents of this document will also guide the work of government in supporting capacity‐building among voluntary and community organizations, and provide a valuable resource for the insurance industry in serving the nonprofit sector. Keywords: CVSS, Centre for Voluntary Sector Studies, Working Paper Series,TRSM, Ted Rogers School of Management Citation

Race, homelessness and inner-city policy in 1980s Britain

This article utilizes an organizational history of the Birmingham-based Handsworth Single Homeless Action Group (HSHAG) to explore black youth homelessness and inner-city policy in 1980s Britain. It draws upon under-used charity archives to intervene in recent debates, considering the part played by the voluntary sector within the Thatcher administrations’ inner-city policies and what targeted funding of this kind reveals about the remaking of the welfare state in these years. First, it introduces HSHAG, setting out the context of inner-city funding programmes, before questioning how sustainable this might have been for voluntary organizations engaged in supporting the homeless population. Secondly, it examines the effects of housing privatization and unemployment on HSHAG's attempts to advise homeless black individuals and assert their rights as citizens to state support. Together, it exposes the role of the voluntary sector in welfare state restructuring and considers how this change made the task of homelessness organizations Herculean.

Developing a university-voluntary sector collaboration for social impact

This article outlines how a team of academics, professional staff and students from a Scottish University in the United Kingdom worked with voluntary sector partners to achieve civic and ‘social purpose’ goals, through setting up a project called The Collaborative. This is a reflective paper that draws on collaborative autoethnography and is written collarboratively by that team of academics, professional staff and students. We explore how universities can achieve their civic engagement goals by serving as anchor institutions, and we develop a conceptual framework for how anchor institutions can enact their institutional mission of ‘social purpose’. We uncover important considerations for university initiatives aiming to improve academic and student engagement with community partners for social change, with three learning points around building relationships, building capacity, and barriers to engagement. Service-learning can be used as a pathway to becoming a civic university, however, there are structural barriers that need to be overcome. This is an account of an ethical fact-finding project, reflecting on our experience of working with the local voluntary sector, designed to facilitate the University’s better engagement with such collaborative ‘social purpose’ ventures.

‘You can’t Google everything’: the voluntary sector and the leadership of communities of place

Responding directly to the themes of the Special Issue, this paper addresses a surprising absence to date of the voluntary sector’s important role in the constitution of place leadership. Drawing on an empirical study of locally rooted voluntary sector organisations in a district of the Midlands of England, we aim to untangle the complex relationship between leadership, place and the voluntary sector, building on recent advances in the collective and critical approaches to leadership studies. A thematic analysis of a rich qualitative dataset highlighted three core themes of the voluntary sector contribution to collective place leadership: their ability to draw on and mobilise local knowledge, their positioning in a web of dense local relationships, and the notion that their intrinsic characteristics are a key source of their distinctiveness and value to the local governance network that constitutes the district’s place leadership. In addition to contributing to a nuanced understanding of the voluntary sector’s place in both the leadership and place leadership studies corpus, our findings shed light on the multiplexity and tensions of leading in the collective, as well as the extent to which the voluntary sector is constrained by wider structures and macro-dynamics.

Contracting for social and welfare services : the changing relationship between government and the voluntary sector in New Zealand

<p>Ten years ago, the provision of government funding for the social and welfare services delivered by voluntary sector service providers was a simple process. In evidence presented to the Waitangi Tribunal in support of a claim by a Charitable Trust against the actions of the New Zealand Community Funding Agency heard last year, a witness who was employed by the Department of Social Welfare from early in 1988 describes the process at that time thus: The Department of Social Welfare has operated funding programmes for many years...these programmes were grant funding. That is there was no contracting nor reporting as presently known. Also they were operated on a Head Ofiice Wellington decision on the recommendation of a small team (3 or 4 people based in a Regional OfiBce Auckland).(Crown Law Office, 1994 c, 6) This simple process has, in the last decade, been replaced by a funding relationship between government and the voluntary sector which owes its origins primarily to theory emanating from the study ofthe operation of private markets and the internal organisation of firms within the marketplace. Agency theory and Transaction costs analysis, along with other theoretical perspectives from the world ofthe private business sector, have had a substantial influence upon the restructuring ofthe public sector in New Zealand during the last decade and in particular have provided the theoretical basis for the transformation of the relationship between government and the voluntary sector into one of principal and agents, bound by contractual terms and a regulatory framework for the monitoring of quantity and quality of social and welfare service outputs.</p>

Contracting for social and welfare services : the changing relationship between government and the voluntary sector in New Zealand

<p>Ten years ago, the provision of government funding for the social and welfare services delivered by voluntary sector service providers was a simple process. In evidence presented to the Waitangi Tribunal in support of a claim by a Charitable Trust against the actions of the New Zealand Community Funding Agency heard last year, a witness who was employed by the Department of Social Welfare from early in 1988 describes the process at that time thus: The Department of Social Welfare has operated funding programmes for many years...these programmes were grant funding. That is there was no contracting nor reporting as presently known. Also they were operated on a Head Ofiice Wellington decision on the recommendation of a small team (3 or 4 people based in a Regional OfiBce Auckland).(Crown Law Office, 1994 c, 6) This simple process has, in the last decade, been replaced by a funding relationship between government and the voluntary sector which owes its origins primarily to theory emanating from the study ofthe operation of private markets and the internal organisation of firms within the marketplace. Agency theory and Transaction costs analysis, along with other theoretical perspectives from the world ofthe private business sector, have had a substantial influence upon the restructuring ofthe public sector in New Zealand during the last decade and in particular have provided the theoretical basis for the transformation of the relationship between government and the voluntary sector into one of principal and agents, bound by contractual terms and a regulatory framework for the monitoring of quantity and quality of social and welfare service outputs.</p>