Group Support

Supporting Voluntary & Community Groups to grow and thrive

Through the free support we provide, VAAC is able to help organisations to grow and achieve their aims; last year alone (2019-2020), we helped 70 organisations with funding bids and applications, 339 new volunteers registered, the development team provided one-to-one support to 136 organisations and 129 people attended VAAC training events on subjects including First Aid, Data Protection/GDPR, Making every Contact Count, Resilience and Trustee Training.

What we offer

Free 1:1 support on the following;

• Start ups – finding the right organisational structure, writing a governing document, recruiting trustees, opening a bank account and more…
• Policies (which ones you should have) and practice (and how to deliver them)
• Strategy planning and how to measure impact of your work
• Advice on writing funding bids and checking them – we need 10 working days before the closing date to review bids
• Recruiting volunteers including Trustees – Contact Volunteer Now!
• Health Checks – advice on development and check you have everything in place
• Advice on websites and getting your message across

Services

We also offer the following services at a charge:

• Training courses (although subsidised)
• Consultancy services – we charge for pieces of work that are more involved than advising. Examples include:
  - Facilitating strategy development days for Trustee Boards
  - Writing funding bids
  - Running bespoke training for organisations

We are happy to discuss your needs with you. Our charges are very reasonably priced for the voluntary sector.
Please contact a member of our team via email below or phone on 01243 840305.
Nina Ghibaldan – development team advisor
Sam Wright – development team advisor

VAAC Membership

If you would like to become a member of VAAC and receive free support, please visit our membership section to see what benefits you could receive and the option to download our membership form.

VAAC Development Team Referral

If you would like support from our development team please download the attached support referral form and return to us. A member of our team will be in contact to give you the advice and support you need.

We need your Feedback

Have you attended one of our training sessions or events, or taken advantage of our 1-2-1 referral meetings and wondered why we ask you for feedback? It is not because we believe in giving you endless paperwork to complete! – it is because it is vital that we can ensure that we are on the right track providing the training and the advice you need.

To make giving feedback easier for you we are changing the way we work and will be trialling capturing your feedback digitally in future rather than asking you to complete an evaluation form.

In order to do this we will send out a survey monkey link to you after the meeting requesting your feedback. This information is very important to us as it is needed by our funders, and also helps to ensure we are delivering the service you want from us, so we would really appreciate your help on this – it is a very short process and won’t take more than a couple of minutes of your time. Thanks you.

Dramatis Community Drama School

Dramatis is a community drama school with funded projects.
VAAC has helped Dramatis get to grips with the ins and outs of setting up a community group. Great support in regards to setting up their constitution and knowing there is somewhere to go when confused.

Can we feature your organisation on our next promotional video?

Hopefully you will have seen the series of videos we released recently shining a spotlight on some of our members and the support they have received from VAAC.
We are hoping to produce some more featuring local groups, would you like to take part?
Please contact Jenny via email to find out more and register your interest.

Our members videos