Ulster Community Investment Trust

Belfast

£18,000

LOCATION

DESCRIPTION

The proposed project will involve a needs analysis on the establishment of a new Public Procurement Brokerage Service (PPBS) that would help not-for-profit social enterprise organisations successfully tender for public service contracts. It is anticipated that PPBS would act as a one-stop-shop for social enterprises throughout Northern Ireland, building their business capacity, identifying procurement opportunities, and guiding them through the tendering process to win public service contracts and ultimately reduce the sector’s dependency on grant funding.

The project will involve three key pieces of research:

1) An assessment of the procurement opportunities currently available to the sector, including the approach taking by the public sector to advertise contracts and average size of contracts;

2) An assessment of the sector’s readiness to avail of procurement opportunities, to include the development of a skills competency framework and subsequent analysis of the skills and business capacity of a sample of 100 social enterprises at different stages of the business growth cycle, and opportunities for collaboration;

3) mapping the procurement process in the Central Procurement Directorate (CPD); NI Departments and local councils.

The research project will be conducted by the Partnership (detailed below) over an 18 month period from September 2010. The research methodology will involve an analysis of existing research on public procurement opportunities for the sector, interviews with officials in CPD, NI Departments and councils, a survey using a questionnaire, interviews and focus group work with a sample population of social enterprise organisations and the production of a needs analysis for the establishment of a PPBS.

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