Argyll and Bute Third Sector Interface (TSI)
Argyll and Bute Council · 5 November 2025
Back to Mid Argyll, Kintyre and the Islands Area Community Planning Group — 5 November 2025 and its agenda
Text extracted from the council's PDF. Layout and reading order may differ from the original.
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Page | 1 Report: MAKI Area Community Planning Group Paper: Third Sector Interface (TSI) Date: 5 November 2025 Prepared by: Caitlin McNeill Introduction This report covers the period from 21st July 2025 to 17th October 2025. A New Third Sector Network for MAKI On the 2nd of October, Caitlin McNeill (TSI) and Antonia Baird (Community Development), with Jo Wheeler (ABCAN), hosted the first meeting of a new network at TALC in Tarbert. There was a great attendance from all over MAKI. There were presentations from The GRAB Trust and Tayinloan Youth Club and after small-group discussions and feedback sessions, it was decided that the group would be beneficial and a further meeting would be held in March. The meetings will likely be held in-person. We were grateful to those attending and contributing to the session. HR advice and building sustainable back-office services Last quarter it was reported that we were in discussions about strengthening our HR freelancer offer for TSOs and this quarter there has been further call for such services from more organisations. In parallel discussions have been ongoing with others in the sector (EDAS, Community Enterprise, Social Enterprise Scotland and others) about whether we could collectively deliver a combined value for money service and a development day is planned for 12th November. Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund (years 5 and 6) The Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund (year 5 and 6) reference panel met on 12th October to make final decisions on who to fund. All successful applicants applied for two-year funding. In summary, 19 organisations have been fully funded for 2 years with 44 out of 71 receiving funding at some level for both Year 1 and Year2. The panel was chaired by ABTSI’s CEO as fund administrator and as well as representatives from the National Lottery, the council and the NHS we were joined by two lived experience representatives. This year’s funding round forms part of the government’s multi-year fairer funding evaluation pilot programme.
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Page | 2 Strategy review 2026-2031 – now known as Community Voices Our consultants SKS have been working hard on devising and distributing the survey that will provide the lead in questions to more detailed focus group work on a sector and TSI strategy and state of the sector report. This can be accessed here:- https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/argyllbute. Please distribute across your networks including friends and family as many of us use community services at some level. Some groups have also offered to host focus groups for which they will be paid. Full details of the programme as a reminder accessible from our website:- https://www.argylltsi.org/community-voices-speaking-up-for-argyll-and-the-isles/. TSI Scotland Network work TSI Scotland Network has now published a summary manifesto which has been sent to all the main political parties ahead of the Scottish Parliamentary elections in May 2026. This work was derived from the seven third sector relevant policy papers as reported last quarter and this is being formatted ahead of publication hopefully next week. ABTSI’s CEO worked on two groups – Rural issues and Public Service Reform. Following on from TSI meetings in May and June 2025 with Jenni Minto MSP in her capacity as Public Health Minister, Labour leader Anas Sarwar MSP and the SNP’s head of policy ABTSI’s CEO along with other third sector representatives met with the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Shirley Anne Somerville MSP in August. It was a high-level meeting but all parties were able to impress upon the Cabinet Secretary that TSO resilience was fragile because of the unstable and unpredictable funding environment combined with high demand. The TSI national two-day conference took place on 28th and 29th October 2025 at the SECC in Glasgow with over 120 TSI staff attending each day from around the country. Day one was focused on practice and operational improvement issues and day two focused on policy and engagement with key change makers and stakeholders at local and national levels. For day one the Head of Regulation at OSCR agreed to be our keynote speaker and for day two the government minister for public service reform, Ivan Mckee MSP. ABTSI was part of three TSIs helping to organise the event, with the CEO drafting the agenda, Janis helping on conference delivery and Lauren helping on conference booking. Finally, our work with the Poverty Alliance project, Taking Action on Rural Poverty, is doing really well. As well as working together on facilitating the voice of lived experience in local policy design work we have also worked together on a presentation to the Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs in early October about challenges in rural Scotland.