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About Us

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Who we are

CDF is a social enterprise that is passionate about helping communities. We have unique expertise in using community development to strengthen local voices, improve people’s lives and create better places to live.

We aim to achieve our vision of successful lives in flourishing communities through our mission to bring together resources, insight and people so that communities can flourish.

• We manage money, support and people, working with, and in, communities.

• We identify, mobilise, and build on networks and skills to catalyse community-led action.

• We reveal the potential of communities to act on opportunities and respond to challenges.

Our priorities for 2012 – 2015 are:

1: Tender for and deliver grant and network programmes which deliver mission.

2: Internally commission activity which meets our current areas of focus:

a.    young people
b.    fair access to resources

With 45 years’ knowledge and expertise, CDF recently transformed from a non-departmental body into a social enterprise. The size and scale of our reach and impact is broad, in the last three years alone CDF has:

• reached 30,000 grassroots organisations;

• built strong relationships with over 100 national civil society groups;

• worked with many government departments, most recently Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Home Office, Office for Civil Society (OCS), Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Afairs (Defra) and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP);

• worked with local authorities on a bespoke basis on a range of subject areas, for example, recently aiding the transition of LINkS to Health and Wellbeing Boards.

CDF’s skills

CDF offer a wide variety of skills to central, local government and the private sector. We can:

• deliver programmes that empower communities to take control and get involved;

• manage community grant programmes at whatever scale from application, award through to review;

• train and support both public and private sector employees that need to improve their reach into and understanding of communities to deliver strategic and policy ambitions;

• undertake research into, and demonstrate the impact of, programmes and work within communities;

• broker partnerships between local service delivery the community sector and the public or private sector.

These services can be adapted to suit a wide range of programmes. Please click the links below to see how we have worked with a variety of clients to create bespoke packages which suit the needs and scale of each programme.

• Active at 60 Community Agent Programme – Department for Work and Pensions

• Big Local – Big Lottery Funded

• Community First – Office for Civil Society, Cabinet Office

Our expertise

• stewardship of a different way of doing things through a community development approach;

• evidence that this works; (illustrating, for example, the connection between participation and  well-being/health/life expectancy/education/economic outcomes);

• partnership approaches to local service delivery between the community sector and the state;

• networks, with communities, to keep us grounded, and with deliverers, to make this happen;

• influence, to lead others in following the philosophy.

We retain excellent links with and understanding of central government and the civil service; CDF is one of six organisations on the Cabinet Office’s (Office for Civil Society) Framework Agreement, allowing us to deliver grant programmes for seven government departments.

Current work

We are currently delivering key government and public body programmes, such as Big Local (Big Lottery Fund), Community First (Office for Civil Society), and Community Action against Crime: Innovation Fund (Home Office).

CDF is a registered charity (1139975) and limited company (7462785).