Several Better Way members are currently in positions of influence with senior levels of government, and this is an opportunity to hear from them about what is going on behind the scenes and, importantly, for you to feed in your insights and advice to help influence future work. Topics to include:Our speakers to kick off the discussion will be:
Our co-founder, Caroline Slocock, will talk about the new Covenant between civil society and government, which was launched by the Prime Minister and Lisa Nandy in July, and commits to working in partnership with civil society – across every department and at national and local level - to deliver shared objectives, and to protecting civil society independence. A new Joint Civil Society Covenant Council is to be established this autumn. Two priority areas for its work include developing local partnerships and Compact compliant commissioning and funding arrangements. Caroline has been closely involved in its development.
Polly Neate from our core group will speak about her new Social Insights Panel, which has been set up with the Future Governance Forum to draw together civil society insight and knowledge – from community activists to national leaders – on how to drive transformational change on cross-cutting, ‘wicked’ challenges. As well as driving a national debate, it will feed ideas into the Cabinet Office’s innovative Test, Learn and Grow programme. A Better Way will be holding a series of workshops for the Social Insights Panel to give you a chance to contribute to these ideas, including a session at our annual conference on how to change the operating model. We will also be working with Test Learn and Grow on how to help them build a wider movement.
Our co-founder, Steve Wyler, will talk about a shift in government procurement in favour of voluntary and community organisations and social enterprises: In February this year, in a significant shift of direction, the Government published a new National Procurement Policy Statement, which requires national and local public bodies to ‘maximise procurement spend with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and voluntary, community and social enterprises’ and remove ‘barriers to participation’. Every government department now has to come up with a plan to make this happen. Steve is a very active member of the group advising the Government on these developments.
We believe that, taken together, these are all opportunities to change the operating model in significant ways, in alignment with Better Way thinking. But as always there is a great distance between high level policy and the realities on the ground. Our event on October 16th will, we hope, help to reduce that gap.
Reserve your place
If you would like to reserve a place for this online meeting you can either fill out our booking form or contact info@betterway.network.
By submitting this form, you consent to your data being saved by A Better Way according to GDPR standards. We will only use your data for A Better Way purposes. You can opt out at any time, please just let us know.