Today, Bristol Charities joined colleagues from across the regional voluntary sector to reflect on and celebrate the past 18 months of partnership working with the Integrated Care Board, while also looking ahead to our shared ambitions for the future. The Alliance has strengthened the voice of the VCSE sector within key decision-making spaces, creating greater visibility, influence and confidence to advocate boldly for the communities we serve.
🧠 The challenge now, and the opportunity, is how we build on this momentum to drive lasting, meaningful change together.
Mark Graham, CEO of Weston’s For All Healthy Living Centre and member of the VCSE Alliance steering group said, “The VCSE sector is the cartographer and the lighthouse; none of us hold the one, true map, so we come together to see the bigger picture. And we keep the light burning; we are trusted places when visibility is poor and people are losing their way”.
💜 As a place-based organisation, Bristol Charities is deeply connected to people’s lives and along with VCSE colleagues, we want to influence the health system to move away from purely transactional interactions to stronger relational ones. Certainly, in our Community Hubs we see significant change in people’s quality of life as we are able to holistically support them and make changes which also affect their health; our Hubs become the lighthouse when members of our neighbours are struggling.
As the Alliance looked ahead to the coming year, the meeting challenged itself with some important questions:
❓ How can we work more effectively as a multi-sector ecosystem; spanning health, social care and education, to better support our communities?
❓ How can we share and pool data to build a clearer understanding of what is happening on the ground?
❓ And how can we increase investment in prevention and the wider conditions for change, reducing pressure on acute services?
💜 Each partner we work with holds part of the picture; by coming together, we have the opportunity to create a fuller, clearer map of community need and opportunity.
👐 Partnership working is not always easy, but at Bristol Charities we are committed to joining our colleagues on that journey.
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