Evaluation of the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (2022-2025)   

This report presents findings from an independent evaluation of the Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership (referred to as the EP) from April 2022 to March 2025, commissioned by the EP as a requirement of grant funding by Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The evaluation was conducted by realife Learning and the report was written in July 2025. Below is text taken from the Executive Summary. You can read the full report as an accessible PDF here.

Achievements

  • The EP's greatest achievement was shifting how people understand resilience, from a narrow emergency response to addressing underlying factors that make communities vulnerable, including poverty, inequality, poor health and climate change.  

  • The EP works as relational infrastructure, the connective tissue helping different parts of the resilience sector work together through trusted relationships. Its strength is bringing diverse organisations together in neutral, non-competitive spaces, allowing knowledge and action to flow between groups that rarely connect otherwise. 

  • The EP acts as a mirror to the sector by reflecting back where organisations fit in the resilience landscape, revealing gaps and disconnections, and helping the sector see how it could work better together. 

  • The EP is now seen as a trustworthy and influential entity which is a necessary first step for any partnership and a first step to enabling better coordination of the VCS in an emergency. 

Progress towards objectives 

    • The EP connected hundreds of organisations from major national charities to small community groups. WhatsApp groups proved particularly effective for rapid coordination during emergencies.  

    • The most meaningful and trusted relationships formed through practical collaboration - taking action together during emergency exercises, joint planning, or actual crisis response - rather than through information sharing alone. 

    • The EP became a trusted bridge between the VCS and local authorities and government, translating complex government information into accessible language and helping community insights reach policymakers in ways individual organisations couldn't achieve alone.  

    • Most partners reported that Government updates translated through the EP were more trusted and relevant than direct government communications, demonstrating the value of the EP's intermediary role. 

    • However, a range of VCS partners of the EP rarely hear back, from government departments or the EP Secretariat, about whether their input influenced decisions, which could undermine sustained engagement. 

    • Traditional training focused on information sharing had limited impact. What proved effective was peer-led learning, local networking, scenario exercises, and 'train-the-trainer' approaches that organisations could adapt to their specific contexts.  

    • The EP's trusted reputation provided community organisations with legitimacy needed to operate within statutory spaces. The Local Leads model demonstrates how a modest EP investment of £6,000 in local infrastructure organisations produced examples of systemic change when combined with the validation and relationship building that the EP provided. However, this approach did not consistently meet the EP's operational needs. 

    • The EP made efforts to embed equity throughout its work, though with mixed results. It raised awareness about how emergencies affect marginalised communities and created platforms for equality-led organisations to influence resilience planning.  

    • However, organisations representing disabled people, ethnic minorities, faith groups, LGBTQ+ communities and others often operated under severe resource constraints that meant meaningful participation remained difficult. 

Recommendations for the EP

  • Continue developing its role as relational infrastructure that provides a mirror to the sector.  

  • Focus on supporting context-led learning that organisations that can adapt. 

  • Share leadership with grassroots and equality-led organisations by including them in strategic decisions.  

  • Build on what learning works: relationships, peer learning, and practical exercises. 

download the full report here
Amy Fryer