Scottish Funders' Forum

That the Parliament welcomes the first Scotland Funders’ Forum conference; congratulates its members, which include lottery distributors, independent grant-making trusts, Scottish Executive departments and COSLA, on the development of a common evaluation framework, to be unveiled at the conference, which aims to improve consistency and provide an effective approach to evaluation and learning by funders; recognises the importance of collaboration among funders to reduce bureaucracy by lessening the burden on voluntary organisations of repeated and differing requests from each of their funders for information, in different forms and on different dates, by replacing these with a more coherent, focussed and uniform system of scrutiny and reporting, agreed by funding and recipient organisations, to work towards continuous improvement and to increase the capacity of funders and applicants to achieve measurable progress; supports the Scotland Funders’ Forum in its efforts to improve the appetite for taking managed risks to meet unmet need and to look ahead to opportunities to broker new and different approaches to providing services for communities, and commends the forum for its commitment to achieving improved outcomes for communities in Scotland.