Crisis and Resilience Fund Summit
Last week, representatives from CVS Cheshire East joined public sector colleagues, health professionals and voluntary sector organisations at the Crisis and Resilience Fund Summit: a significant half-day event that brought together the people and organisations who work every day to support residents facing hardship across the borough.
The summit marked the beginning of a co-design process for Cheshire East's new Crisis and Resilience Fund, a three-year government grant worth £4 million per year running from 2026 to 2029. For CVS, it was both an opportunity to contribute our sector's voice and a moment to reflect on just how much the voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise sector does: and how much more it could do with the right support.
The Crisis and Resilience Fund represents a significant shift in how government crisis support reaches local communities. Since November 2020, councils like Cheshire East have delivered crisis support through a succession of short-term national schemes - the Covid Winter Grant, the Covid Support Grant, and multiple rounds of the Household Support Fund - each issued on tight timescales, often with only six months of funding at a time and narrowly defined conditions on how money could be spent. The new CRF replaces this cycle of uncertainty with a three-year settlement, giving local authorities and their partners more space to plan and effectively distribute this money for maximum impact. Crucially, the fund goes beyond simply responding to immediate hardship. Alongside crisis payments and housing support, it explicitly requires investment in financial resilience and community coordination, recognising that sustainable change means helping people and communities become better equipped to weather future difficulties, not just addressing the crisis in front of them.
Graham Brown, Sector Development Officer at CVS, took to the floor to present findings on the current state of the VCFSE sector in Cheshire East, and his message was clear: our communities need us, our organisations are under pressure, and the time for genuine partnership has never been more urgent.
Drawing on data from both the 2023 Cheshire and Merseyside State of the VCFSE Sector survey and CVS's own 2025 Knowing Our Communities survey, Graham painted a picture of a sector doing extraordinary work in extraordinarily difficult circumstances. Across Cheshire East, there are over 3,400 VCFSE organisations: from registered charities to community groups operating well below the radar, delivering everything from food support and mental health services to befriending, transport and welfare advice.
The numbers tell a sobering story. In 2024/25, 71% of local organisations saw their expenditure increase, while only 34% saw their income rise. More than half of those holding reserves watched them shrink. And when asked about the future, just 31% felt confident about their financial sustainability over the next three years. This is a sector running on goodwill, passion and increasingly empty reserves.
Yet despite this, demand continues to grow. More residents than ever are affected by poverty, food insecurity, rising living costs and social isolation, and it is community organisations that are often the first, and sometimes only, port of call.
Graham was also honest about a frustration that many in the room will have recognised: the sense that the voluntary sector is still too often treated as a secondary option rather than a genuine equal partner. Survey respondents spoke of feeling disconnected from statutory decision-making, undervalued, and asked to fill gaps without the resources to do so sustainably.
But the summit itself felt like a step in a different direction. The willingness of Cheshire East Council to bring voluntary and community organisations into the design of this fund from the very start is genuinely encouraging. What VCFSE organisations are asking for is not complicated: co-design, multi-year funding, core cost support, and the recognition that free services have never been free to deliver.
CVS Cheshire East left the summit energised and committed to playing our full part in shaping a Crisis and Resilience Fund that truly works for our communities.
The co-design process is now well underway, with a clear roadmap ahead. Over the coming weeks, the Cheshire East team will be summarising the outputs and key themes from the summit's workshops, before a second summit in June where partners will come together to consolidate ideas into a clear, shared proposal. That proposal will then be tested and refined through community consultation, ensuring that the voices of residents will shape the final design. A third and final summit is planned for September, which will serve as the formal launch event for the programme. For any organisations that weren't able to attend but would like to feed into the process, the team can be contacted at CRF@cheshireeast.gov.uk.
