Many charities and not-for-profit groups in Cornwall are telling us they are being squeezed in two ways by the Credit Crunch.  Firstly, they are seeing demand for their services increase, as some people’s personal circumstances  change for the worse, for example due to redundancy or reduced hours.  Secondly, the sources of income for voluntary and community groups are getting tighter.  There is a threat to levels of donations, and increased competition for grants such as Lottery funding.

What are the leaders of the sector doing to address these problems?  Well, quite a lot as it happens.  Here are just a few of the activities:

• For the last eighteen months, we have been bringing the problems and issues to the attention of the public sector and are feeding facts and figures regularly through the Cornwall Strategic Partnership and the Local Area Agreement (see link).
• Working together with Jobcentre Plus, Citizens Advice have established a ‘Financial Inclusion and Debt’ group which sits under the ‘Inclusion Cornwall’ Partnership (see Inclusion Cornwall) to drive forward new services and projects addressing the needs of the most financially disadvantaged people within the County.
• The Charity Chief Executives in Cornwall group invited the Chair of the Charity Commission to talk about the issues at meeting on 9th Feb (see our event report)
• The Cornwall Infrastructure Partnership (one of the VSF’s sub-groups) is planning to produce a ‘resilience pack’ to give money saving and other advice to charities so that they can maximise their effectiveness and sustain themselves through difficult circumstances.
• We know from our research that funding is consistently the number one concern of our membership.  Our sub-group, Cornwall Infrastructure Partnership, has therefore prioritised the creation of a new network of funding advisors to help local charities make the most of their funding opportunities, and they are currently awaiting the outcome of an application to the Big Lottery to set this up.
• The South West Forum has produced a very worrying report called ‘ Contracts, cuts and closures’ (see www.southwestforum.org.uk) which gives a depressing picture of some of the present challenges.
• The VSF itself is making collaboration to save money and reduce costs a key theme of its event on Localism on 20th March.

However, we recognise that all this is just scratching the surface of the issues that we may face over the next few years.  We  would be very interested in your views of how we can do more.