One of CVS Cheshire East’s core aims is to Empower the Voice of the Voluntary, Community and Faith Sector (VCFS) locally.

We do this through gathering the collective voice of the VCFS on issues and working with the relevant organisation to represent the voice of the sector and endeavour to effect change.  We want to ensure that all VCFS organisations feel able and confident to raise their voice and want to understand how CVS can better support this to happen.

To do this we undertook a survey with the aim of hearing the views of VCFS organisations and Statutory partners to support us to improve our service.  The survey took place between March and May 2018 and was extended for a short period with the aim of encouraging more responses from statutory partners.

86 people completed the Survey with 81% from VCFS organisations and 19% from statutory partners. The survey was split into 2 sections with representatives from VCFS organisations and Statutory organisations completing different questions.

This document contains the full results from the survey and details what this tells us, what CVS is currently doing in this area and what our future plans would be.

A summary of what we actions we plan to take from the survey is:

• VCFS organisations stated they wanted to have contact with Eastern Cheshire CCG and South Cheshire CCG but weren't able to.  CVS will make contact with both CCG's and find ways to improve their relationship with the VCFS.  This is particularly important with the merger of the 4 CCGs in Cheshire which aims to be completed by 2020.

• Both the VCFS and Statutory organisations have stated that CVS needs to improve our communication on voice issues and we are committed to doing that over the next 12 months.  We are launching a new voice e-bulletin in August and will be developing an e-bulletin for our statutory sector colleagues.  We have also reviewed the content on our website to make it clearer how to raise voice issues and where we currently represented the VCFS

• We only had a small sample of responses from statutory partners so there is further work for us to do to understand the views and opinions of our key stakeholders.