December 5, 2022

For our December newsletter, Chair of Trustees, Mike Taylor, pondered the need for us, and other VCFSE organisations, to blow our own trumpets:

In preparing for our AGM and reading the excellent Annual Review two aspects of the work done by everyone in Cumbria CVS have come into clearer focus for me.

Firstly, the breadth, depth and diversity of the activities of CVS staff and volunteers are quite remarkable. Secondly, it seems to me that this is not widely realised or understood by many people in the county. I began to feel this when I found myself short on some of the details about one of our activities in the response to a fellow CACE Trustee even though I have sat in on most Team meetings for the past couple of years.

Then I began to hear how some of the elected members on the new authorities of Cumberland and Westmorland with Furness clearly had very little understanding of what we do in support of our member organisations and for the third sector generally. But if I had a problem marshalling information about one of our activities why was I surprised that others were even more unsighted?

Why is this important? For me it is because we all need the satisfaction of having what we do fully appreciated and specifically in this case we need to ensure that those who are amongst our funders fully understand how important is the work being done. So what can we do about it? I believe we all need to be less modest about what we do – we need to be prepared to talk about our activities and achievements to anybody and everybody all of the time and not just leave it to the communications team.

In other words we collectively need to ‘blow our own trumpets’ and constantly tell people what we do – not to aggrandise ourselves but simply to ensure that we obtain and retain the support and understanding of all our stakeholders for the hugely important work being done by all our staff and volunteers across CCVS. If you find it difficult to sing your own praises then sing those of colleagues.

If we do that from here on in then we should be able to enjoy even more the pleasures of the festive season about to begin.