Community Organisations

Our Councils for Voluntary Service offer support to all voluntary and community organisations in their area. They may also manage various projects, such as those that support Carers, or the elderly and can help anyone setting up a new project or community group, particularly offering advice on appropriate governance and fund raising.

The CVSs offer a clearing house for people who wish to volunteer and organisations who need a particular volunteer.

Many offer bespoke training courses and / or run an annual training programme.Workshops on fund raising, use of social media, motivations of volunteers may be of particular interest to the churches. As examples of training offered the 2017 information on the training programmes for North Devon Voluntary Services and Devon Communities Together can be found on our "Training page"

Devon Communities Together (formerly known as the Community Council for Devon) operates county wide and has a subtitle "helping communities help themselves". They are involved in a wide range of projects, pasrticularly in helping whole communities develop projects and working in areas such as the development of rural affordable housing, offering help with neighbourhood planning and offer many services and training that could be very helpful to churches.

Devon Voluntary Action is a partnership of voluntary organisations, particlualry bringing together the work of the various CVSs, and again operates county wide.

Each CVS operates across a particular district council area. To access some of their services you might need to be a member - but the annual subs are very modest.

Whilst some church work can be quite specific (such as the format for annual accounts and Safeguarding Policies), much of the work we need to do in runing our churches in terms of fund raising, running meetings, making the mkost of advertising opportuinities etc is similar for many voluntary organisations. Our county and district community support organisations are often under-used by churches, but offer a great service, and are available locally.

The websites, or other contact details, for all our Councils for Voluntary Service, Devon Communities Together and Devon Voluntary Action are given below.

Devon Communities Together

Devon Voluntary Action

Councils for Voluntary Service