NCVO has long influenced government to ensure charities and volunteers have what they need to make a difference and to strengthen civil society for the future. Over the years we’ve influenced to improve charity regulation, campaigning rules, funding for charities, support for volunteers and much more. Now we need your help to redesign how we work with you, our members, to better influence government.
Why this work is important
When you helped us develop our strategy, you rightly told us you wanted to be more involved in our influencing work. We know your input makes a difference and we need your expertise to shape how we work.
- Legitimacy and accountability: We are a membership body – we exist for and because of our members. It’s vital we’re accountable to both our board of trustees and our wider membership. What we’re doing and why should be transparent to all our members.
- Strength and effectiveness: Charities and volunteers are facing tough challenges so we need our influencing to be as effective as possible. The size and diversity of our membership is our strength. We need your expertise, experience and support to develop and push for effective solutions.
Project activities
We’re running a number of activities between now and summer 2022 to develop this new way of working.
- Before Christmas we’ll conduct interviews with our members to understand and explore their experiences and views on how they’d like to be involved in our work to influence government.
- We’ll speak to other organisations about how they approach influencing with their communities or members.
- We’ll speak to you at our AGM in November and run a series of workshops to design a way of working with you.
Our board, which is representative of NCVO members, will be heavily involved throughout this project and ultimately decide on which approach we take forward.
How to get involved
We’d like to hear from you. We need your thoughts on how members and volunteers should be involved in:
- deciding what issues to influence on
- deciding what positions we should take on issues
- developing solutions to put to government
- supporting our influencing and campaigning work.
If you’d like to speak to us about this project, please email rebecca.young@ncvo.org.uk.
Rebecca Young is a senior policy officer at NCVO, working primarily on public services and volunteering policy. Before joining NCVO, Rebecca led on mental health, housing and disability policy at the National Union of Students. 
