August 9, 2024

Our District Manager for Cumberland, Bridget Johns, gives us an update on what she’s been up to in June & July, including supporting a variety of groups, hopes for a Carlisle Development Officer, attending the Cumbria Modern Slavery and Exploitation partnership and exploring Community Power…

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As the District Manager Cumberland, I have a varied role which includes project management, line management, supporting groups directly, writing project proposals and funding applications, developing and maintaining relationships with stakeholders plus attending partnership meetings.

Development officer work (supporting voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations to improve their capacity in areas such as funding, governance and business planning) has been part of my role for many years. Although this is now a small part of my job, it’s important to me to directly support groups to improve their sustainability. This is so that I can maintain and develop my knowledge and skills (and share this with other Development Officers), and also to develop and maintain the key relationships I have with VCSE organisations and understand what the key issues are and communicate this more widely as appropriate. The latter is vital as one of Cumbria CVS’ key roles is to be a voice for the sector that we support.

In June and July I supported a variety of groups, covering roller skating (it always reminds me of skating in the 1980s to Uptown Girl), sensory support, older people, hairdressing and community parks. The support has included advice on legal structures, understanding the roles and responsibilities of trustees, developing safeguarding polices and feedback on funding applications.

I worked on developing a project proposal for a Carlisle based Development Officer. With changes and cuts in funding we have been unable to retain a dedicated Development Officer for this area and this has had a large impact on the support we are able to provide to Carlisle based VCSEs. But rest assured that we are working are resolving this.

I attended the Cumbria Modern Slavery and Exploitation partnership on behalf of Cumbria CVS. This partnership has been set up to tackle the issue of modern slavery (exploitative labour that places one person in the control of another). If a person is forced to carry out work for which they didn’t offer themselves voluntarily, and they are not free to leave, it is a case of slavery. I have recently met with Ginelle Ward who is the Detective Sergeant for Serious Organised Crime and Exploitation for Cumbria Police. This is a new role for the Police, starting in March this year. This is a subject that I don’t know much about and do what to expand my knowledge and understanding. Ginelle delivers workshops on Modern Slavery and has agreed to deliver some specific sessions to the VCSE sector over the next 6-months – watch out for more details.

I met with Suzanne Wilson (Research Fellow in Social Inclusion and Community Engagement, UCLan Westlakes Campus) so that I could learn more about Community Power, which is the belief that people should have a say over the places in which they live and the services they use. Suzanne is very passionate about this and brought several communities together with the Cumberland Council to co-create new ways to work together. This was done over 18 months through community workshops, where residents explored different strategies for democratic participation and later discussed these with the Council in co-creation sessions. This is a new engagement approach for Cumberland Council and I’m looking forward to seeing the positive difference it can make. If you would like to read Suzanne’s research paper ‘Community Power – Co-Creating Approaches to Participatory Democracy’ then click here.

Well seeing it all written down like this, I have had a busy and varied 2-months within my job role (and this only covers a fraction of it). Let’s see what August and September brings (apart from my 2-week summer break).