Our core purpose of supporting a vibrant voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector, promoting volunteering and community action, and ensuring the sector has a strong voice through our networks, remains a vital aspect of local civil society. Whilst helping Southampton become a city where everyone is inspired to make a positive contribution to their communities is more relevant than ever before.
In recent years SVS has stepped back from directly delivering services to the public, choosing instead to collaborate with our member organisations to address community need and gaps in public services. This has been a strategic decision, based on an increasingly mature and vibrant local sector, and our own role as, foremost, an infrastructure and support organisation.
We have taken the role of identifying issues to address, bringing partners together to play to their strengths, and finding resources to support joint activity. Not only is this approach characterised in the SVS led SO:Linked programme, but is a thread running through all of our work, including mental health, dementia, fuel and food poverty, and community research.