Project: Accessible Social Investment for Birmingham

Grant: £50,000

The project will build BVSC staff expertise on social investment to pilot VCSE enterprise development support. Initially, BVSC will engage with OPM (Traverse) to provide training and development to BVSC to build the capacity of internal staff to embed social finance knowledge and skills in the organisation. This will progress to the development and delivery of a pilot project for BVSC’s VCSE members to raise awareness of social investment, and to build consortia or collaborative social enterprise projects across the West Midlands Combined Authority area.

The project will carry out a stakeholder benchmarking exercise across the region; map BVSC staff’s social investment knowledge and develop an internal training programme to build staff skills; develop an external training programme for the VCSE sector more widely; develop a web resource on the existing website; develop a diagnostic tool which will enable local VCSE organisations to assess their readiness to engage with social investment opportunities; review of current social investment interventions in region to determine priority areas for future work; and develop two collaborative projects with VCSEs to foster enterprise development and progress towards social investment.

The project aims to deliver high-quality social investment advice and better engage member VCSEs; and give access to training on social investment to organisations in West Midlands so they are better equipped to take a more proactive and intelligent approach to engaging with social finance. BVSC will work in partnership and share information on its project with Wolverhampton Voluntary Service Council (WVSC).