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UK National Audit Office publications

Work in Progress: Building Capacity in the Third Sector

The current government is committed to working closely with third sector organisations (TSOs) - charities, community and voluntary groups, social enterprises and other forms of non-profit and non-State organisations such as co-operatives - which it believes have a key role to play in UK society. Government believes that the sector is not realising its potential to deliver on these roles because many TSOs lack the capacity – a general term including, for example, physical assets, finance skills, information technology and workforce development - to do so.

Since 2002, government has launched several new capacity-building initiatives including ChangeUp, a programme aimed at supporting the infrastructure of organisations that exist at national and local levels to improve support for front line TSOs; and Futurebuilders, a £125 million fund providing mainly loans and some grants to enable TSOs to engage in innovative public service delivery. Since its formation in 2006, these initiatives have been sponsored by the Office of the Third Sector in the Cabinet Office.

This study will track the development of central government’s capacity-building initiatives since the 2002 review, asking whether government is doing the right things to achieve its objective of increasing the capacity of the third sector. We will examine:

• how government determined the need for capacity-building interventions aimed at the third sector;
   
• how the capacity-building schemes (including ChangeUp and Futurebuilders) were designed to meet those needs; and
   
• the results achieved by the two most significant schemes, Futurebuilders and ChangeUp, to date.
   

Publication Schedule

We will publish this report later in 2008.
 

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