Open Doors is the term given to the CSV wide strategy concerned with:

• securing a more effective, strategic engagement of volunteering with public services
• developing new and innovative volunteering solutions appropriate to the challenges and priorities of those services.

Since its inception CSV has always sought to work with public services - and particularly those managed and provided locally (such as social services and schools), in a way that adds quality, value and innovation to those services and facilitates active citizenship.

However, those services, and the bureaucracies concerned with delivering them, are subject to a radical and on-going reform agenda as the government seeks to achieve its ambition of ‘world class’ public services.

Volunteering can help deliver better
public services

At the same time, the Government has made it clear that it sees the voluntary and community sector in general - and volunteering in particular - as having a vital role to play in both delivering better public services and building more cohesive, inclusive communities.

Opening doors and forging links

As the UK’s major volunteering organisation, our ‘Open Doors’ strategy will give both expression and direction to the task of ensuring that the volunteering services we manage and provide, both cohere with and inform the development of national and local public services priorities.

Open Doors provides CSV with a more effective means of forging effective links, at both policy and service delivery levels, between the government’s desire to improve the quality of public services and its aspirations towards the building of more cohesive communities through active citizenship.

For further information please contact Duncan Tree by email at dtree@csv.org.uk