Currently, IVAR carries out five activities which fall under the broad heading of ‘capacity building’:

Academic and practitioner conference papers and presentations
Articles in academic journals
Publication of research reports
Joint seminar series with Birkbeck College
Programmes of training and skills development with practitioners (for example, the I&DeA Partnership Improvement Programme and the Capacity Building the Capacity Builders programme).

Training and skills development

IVAR’s approach to training and skills development programmes has four distinctive features:

Evidence based
Content and materials are adapted for practical use from the knowledge generated through our ongoing action research in areas of direct relevance to third sector practitioners. Furthermore, the findings from these programmes themselves are fed back into our research work, as well as being used to inform the future delivery of capacity building work.

Collaborative
All of our work is developed and delivered collaboratively. The mutual benefits of this approach include: local knowledge (of participants and their external environments) which ensures that content is relevant and grounded; potential for embedding learning and change in local support networks.

Non-prescriptive
Our earlier work in this area has confirmed that the diversity and complexity of individual organisations and their local communities does not lend itself to uniform solutions. Support interventions need to be rooted in participants’ own particular contexts; adaptable, in-depth, long-term and localised support is more likely to achieve effective and lasting change.

Public policy
Finally, all of our work is explicitly located, and continually related back to, the wider UK public policy context for third sector organisations.

more >