Mission
IVAR is committed to supporting the development and sustainability of voluntary sector organisations through research, education and training. We believe that these organisations have distinctive features and also need to be understood in the context of their policy environment.
Our work has a dual purpose: improving practice and contributing to shaping the national and local policy environment for voluntary sector organisations.
We aim to achieve this
- by using action research. This means we work collaboratively with partners and clients to build practical responses to real problems. Our interventions are enabling and empowering, helping organisations to mobilise their own resources and manage their own situations.
- by being a team of people who believe in the importance and value of voluntary action and civil society, and who share an ideological commitment to the independence of the voluntary sector.
- by gathering, refining and exchanging knowledge in order to contribute to change and the development of practice, policy and theory.
- by applying the highest standard of academic excellence and ethical rigour in all our work.
Simple.
We use the ‘voluntary sector’ as a broad term to cover organisations which may variously describe themselves as belonging to the ‘community sector’, the ‘voluntary and community sector’, the ‘third sector’, the ‘nonprofit sector’ and so on.