Leeds Digital Volunteering Partnership (LDVP) is made up of representatives from 100% Digital Leeds, Leeds Community Foundation, Voluntary Action Leeds, Forum Central, and the city’s tech sector.
LDVP fosters cross-sector partnerships that help the city’s third sector organisations benefit from the digital skills and capacity of the tech sector, and to enable tech businesses and their employees to gain new skills, experience, and a sense of community through work with not-for-profit organisations.
The partnership was formed after the success of the Leeds Digital Ball and Leeds Digital Inclusion Fund highlighted further opportunities for the tech sector to support the third sector other than financially.
The feedback from digital businesses and third sector organisations has been that it can often be difficult to ‘find each other’ and form meaningful, mutually beneficial, lasting relationships. The LDVP aims to overcome this barrier by:
- Developing the resources, tools, and infrastructure to empower businesses and people that want to give their time where it meets the needs of communities.
- Informing and helping to guide tech sector Corporate Social Responsibility offers.
- Supporting third sector digital transformation.
- Building citywide capacity to support digital inclusion.
Key objectives
In June 2023, a roundtable discussion was convened to explore how skills within the tech sector could be passed into the third sector to support in addressing the digital divide. The roundtable brought together representatives from both sectors to explore what such support could, or should, look like.
All of the objectives below will be achieved by working to the following principles:
- Talking to the digital and third sectors about the barriers they face to successful cross-sector partnership.
- Collating examples of where relationships have already formed and the impact they had, so that we can understand what ‘good’ looks like and replicate it.
- Developing the necessary tools to help the right interactions happen in the right way going forward.
Sharing skills and capacity to support digital inclusion
We aim to develop the necessary infrastructure to match the tech sector’s Employer Supported Volunteering (ESV) capacity with third sector organisations where skills and capacity are barriers to them by offering a sustainable model of digital skills support within communities.
Sharing skills and capacity to support digital transformation
We aim to develop the infrastructure that’s needed to match digital businesses offering social value and pro bono specialist digital skills support to third sector organisations looking to facilitate digital transformation, in a way that is efficient, meaningful, and mutually beneficial.
The Value of an Expert Sounding Board – Doing Good Leeds
Increasing tech sector representation on third sector boards
We aim to increase the number of people with high level digital skills involved with third sector organisations at a strategic board level. We are working with Third Sector Lab to pilot their Digital Trustees model in Leeds.
A Digital Trustee is a volunteer with experience in digital who sits on the Board of a third sector organisation. They provide guidance to the organisation around how they can best make use of digital as well as insight into best digital practices, allowing the digital infrastructure of charities to be properly embedded across their work. Digital Trusteeships create a more permanent and long standing relationship between charities and individuals from the tech sector. The Trustee is able to gain a better understanding of the needs of the charity as well as gaining a strong grounding in strategic oversight, supporting their personal development. Having a Digital Trustee on their Board means charities have a trusted tech champion to help them find digital solutions that truly work for them and their beneficiaries.
Digital Trustees Matchmaking Event, 28th March, Meeting Registration – Zoom