The Community Planning landscape is complex and ever changing to meet the needs of the City and the Country. Partnership working requires strong understanding of the landscape and opportunities provided by it. Voluntary organisations can see Community Planning as remote or too complex. This means both that the Third Sector doesn’t benefit fully from Community Planning and that the Public Sector does not benefit fully from the Sector’s unique reach into communities.
This strand aims to ensure that through partnership working the Third and Public Sectors can maximise their impact on key drivers of poverty and inequality and support the Third Sector in their understanding of the landscape and of the role of the Compact Partnership within it.
Within a changing context the City’s Third Sector will need to be supported and enabled if Edinburgh is to work together better and become more sustainable in the long term.
Community Safety Partnership – co-ordinated campaigns around themes pertinent to the City.
Outcomes:
- The Third Sector is central to the achievement of Community Planning outcomes
- The Third Sector is at the centre of developing services, ensuring citizens and communities are at the heart
- The unique reach of the Third Sector in tackling poverty and inequality in the City is maximised supporting the Edinburgh Partnership’s strategic priorities and prevention plan
- The Third Sector supports communities to articulate their needs
Drivers for this strand:
There is need for improved targeted communication regarding the Community Planning landscape as the Third Sector finds it complex and the role of the Compact within it unclear. With a move to new service delivery models across the City there is even greater potential for the Third Sector to become more integrated and central to service planning and delivery.
With the Health and Social Care Partnership becoming a legal entity in the form of the Integrated Joint Board the city’s Third Sector infrastructure will need to adapt to these changes, and it is likely that the Children’s Partnership will follow suit.
The Third Sector is recognised as having a unique reach into communities, and Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service are keen to grow their connections with the Third Sector to benefit from its help in addressing key community issues.
There is a strong belief in the Third Sector that they can collectively create change when they are working collaboratively. There is also a desire to get behind a shared “wicked” issue pertinent to the city to have a city-wide positive social impact.
