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No / low cost skills exchange
This idea was brought up by participants at both the London and the Birmingham regional roundtable discussions on a skills strategy for the voluntary sector http://www.skills-thirdsector.org.uk/research_policy/skills_strategy_consultation In tough times, participants said they wanted somewhere they could go to find out about the skills the sector has to offer and a way of exchanging skills with other charities, social enterprises and voluntary sector organisations as well as across other sectors. Are there any examples of places where this is already happening? What are other people’s thoughts on this as an idea? How could a skills exchange for the sector be resourced? Posts please!
Posted by natasharoe on 14 July 2010 02:35 PM
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The same idea came up at the STS event yesterday. The concerns expressed by participants were around releasing staff to spend that time elsewhere - it’s difficult to find enough capacity in an organisation just to get the work done.
Posted by Christine on 16 July 2010 02:39 PM
Something similar does happen informally right now, in the form of phoned or emailed questions and occasional meetings when there’s something big to discuss. VAS ‘picked the brains’ of other organisations when our new building was in development and other organisations have come to us for the same reason. This is more about sharing expertise than about staff development.
We ran a management mentoring project while we had the capacity - matching volunteer mentors to managers in the sector who wanted that development support. We had a bit of funding originally to pay for staff time and kept it going as long as we could after that ended. There’s still a demand for this service but we no longer have time to organise it. -
E-Learning might be part of the solution and a model similar to Learning Pool’s training portal for the public sector, another.
Posted by David@NAVCA on 21 July 2010 12:16 PM -
Thanks very much for these suggestions. We are about to embark on a piece of desk research to try and identify further skills / learning exchange networks. We are interested in both formal and informal networks and particularly any that share skills development and learning in the four skills priority areas we are consulting on. Governance and leadership; skills for business; managing volunteers; and measuring impact and effectiveness. If anyone has any leads then please post them here and we will follow them up. Many thanks
Posted by natasharoe on 01 September 2010 02:58 PM -
My project to foster an educational Community of Practice in the sector might be of interest. There’s more information on my blog: http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/CharityOERs
Posted by TonyC on 19 March 2011 09:20 AM
Best wishes,
Tony
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