Rosie Anderson

The points made in this post definitely apply to community centres and similar organisations. The vast majority of them work with older people – our annual survey of members indicated that about 85% of them list older people as one of their main user groups. The rising numbers of older people, the health implications for living longer than ever before – for example, the rising numbers of people living with dementia – and the flurry of policy interventions around the aging population are all thin...

Social enterprise has reached a rather cult-like status in some parts of Government and the Voluntary and Community Sector. It’s not hard to see why as it is a concept that tries to answer some of the big issues facing us in the future. How can social action find a sustainable financial model? What can replace Government grants, and shouldn’t we be asserting our independence by moving away from that anyway?

Many people have made intelligent points about the structural issues and opportuniti...

This seems to be one of the big tensions in the Big Society agenda, and one that we’ve yet to really see played out properly. The Government task force reviewing bureaucracy and regulation in the voluntary and community sector have been asked to review volunteering practices and examine how red tape is over-formalising volunteering by making charities more risk averse. There won’t be any easy answers to balancing the public’s expectation that risk be removed from their interactions with service ...