Voluntary and Community Sector

There are critical challenges facing charities of all sizes right now: generating income and funding, making the case for the difference that your work makes, tackling diversity and inclusion, and work to improve collaboration, partnership working and commissioning practices. Traverse can support you to meet these challenges.

Our day to day work involves working with charities to:

Demonstrate the difference your work, and funding for your work, makes
Test and learn from approaches to service and programme delivery
Understand and improve practice regarding commissioning, collaboration and partnership working
Make sure that your work is person-centred

Traverse has a 30 year history of working with partners across the sector, as well as in health and care, and local government. We are proud of the work that we do to support the sector and to bring the voice of the people from centre to decision making and service design. In the past year we have worked with:

Ageing Better Camden to inform the development of their work to prevent and mitigate social isolation and loneliness among older people in Camden.
Bexley VCS to think and plan for the future beyond COVID-19
BookTrust and their senior leadership team to peer review their organisational Theory of Change
Consortium to support their members with outcome-based design and evaluation and help move the LBGT+ sector towards outcome-based commissioning .
Mind to engage people with lived experience in their 2021-24 strategy development and with Mind, Co-op, SAMH and Inspire to conduct innovative place-based research across the UK to identify the factors which support community resilience and practical actions to support and sustain these.
The Richmond Group of Charities draw together learning on how to work together as a coalition and support physical activity people with long term conditions and disabilities.
Samaritans to support an organisation-wide evidence review
Sense to understand how to support frontline staff deliver their sport and physical activity agenda and reflect on the digital transformation of their services.
Tesco and its charity partners, British Heart Foundation, CRUK and Diabetes UK to co-design a set of recommendations which shaped a new workplace wellbeing programme

Zoe Khor: zoe.khor@traverse.ltd

We specialise in:

Evaluation - helping you provide evidence about your impact and learning about how you projects and programmes are working – we understand you need evidence to influence, and formative learning to inform and improve practise
Research - generating robust independent analysis to help shape project and programme design – we understand the need for insights which are person-centred to help inform the design of projects, programmes and services.
Engagement - processes design using participatory and deliberative approaches to help you involve stakeholders and people who use services to feedback, challenge and inform service design and strategy
Organisational development - supporting you and your organisation to see the bigger picture
Social investment - advice and consultancy

We strive to ensure that our work is informed by good practice in inclusive practice. Understanding and evidencing the lived experience of the people you work with and for is core to everything we do. Our work informs and is informed by the work of our Lived Experience Advisory Panel (LEAP).

Crucially we ensure that our approaches are non-burdensome and avoid duplication – we understand the pressures you are under and know how valuable your time is.

We would be pleased to explore your needs and identify ways we can help you in the work you do. Please contact: Zoe.khor@traverse.ltd and tim.bidey@traverse.ltd

We work with; Age UK, Age UK Camden, Bexley VSC, Birmingham VSC, BookTrust, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, Consortium, Crisis, Disability Rights UK, LeonardCheshire Disability, Macmillan Cancer Research, Mind, The Motor Neurone Disease Association, National Lottery Community Fund, The Prince’s Trust, The Richmond Group,Samaritans, Sense, Shelter, Versus Arthritis.

We recently reflected on the post-Covid 19 pandemic future. Please see here for VCS