Training and Consultancy

Tamara’s July blog:    

Over the past few months I have been doing some pro bono work for a number of small local charities including Shaftesbury Home-Grown and Transition Town Shaftesbury, advising on constitutions, charitable status, bank accounts for small community organisations etc.  Giving free advice sessions to local voluntary sector groups is rewarding but is also useful in reminding me of the issues facing emerging organisations.    

The work with Christchurch Community Partnership's New Druitt Community Centre continues and I am delivering some training sessions on writing effective fundraising bids.  The "Buy a Brick" campaign is underway, and the fundraising website for the New Druitt Community Centre can be seen at www.thenewdruittfund.org.uk

Over in Somerset I continue with the independent commissioning advisory body assessing and supporting the existing infrastructure bodies (CVSs and others) to deliver infrastructure support to the wider VCS.   A very innovative process which is likely to have wider potential.  

County CVSs have recruited consultants to be on their lists to provide organisational health checks for VCOs considering collaborations or mergers as part of a modernisation process, and I am on the approved lists in Dorset, Somerset and Hampshire.  CapacityBuilders have set a complex system whereby local organisations wanting the funded consultancy have to apply to the central CapacityBuilders office for approval before they can choose a local consultant to work with them, so any work arising from this is likely to be later in the summer.

Pictures of this year's Shaftesbury Local Food Festival can now be seen by clicking on the hyperlink.    

Tamara Essex is a freelance management consultant working for charities, voluntary and community organisations, community partnerships, and with the statutory sector.

She can help large and small organisations with service development, fundraising, business planning, and strategic and organisational development.

Tamara volunteers with Swans Trust in her home town of Shaftesbury, north Dorset, and through them is the organiser of the Shaftesbury Local Food Festival, a celebration of local produce from the Blackmore Vale.    More details about this can be found at the festival website:   Shaftesbury Local Food Festival