Our vision > VSO's strategy

Focus for Change

These goals reflect internationally agreed development targets, our partner organisations' priorities and areas where we know that VSO can be most effective.

The plan also sets out three approaches which will be central to the way we work: 

• Empowerment

  We will work to empower the people, communities and organisations with whom we work.

• Partnership

  We will work in partnerships in order to maximise our impact.

• Commitment to learning

  We will actively learn so that our work builds upon the skills, knowledge and understanding gained from experience.

What have VSO done so far?

• Refocused our work on the poorest countries where it is safe to work.
• Refocused our work on six priority areas, or goals: education, HIV&AIDS, disability, secure livelihoods, participation and governance and health and social well-being.
• Begun building stronger, longer-term partnerships with organisations with whom VSO can work to achieve the greatest change for poor people.
• Focused our work on three priority areas within each country, identified in consultation with partner organisations and other stakeholders.
• Designed programmes for working with partners to tackle both the symptoms and the causes of poverty.
• Merged with British Executive Service Overseas (beso), enabling us to increase the number of short-term volunteers we place and so provide a better service to partners
• Diversified the range of options for working with partners to include international long-term, short-term and youth volunteers, community and national volunteering, workshops and exchanges, advocacy and global education.
• Continued to work with partners to improve the lives of disadvantaged people.
• Steadily increased our charitable income.  

What are VSO working on now?

• Maximising our impact by working to sustain and increase the size of our core programme of international volunteering.
• Growing our support for national volunteering and youth exchanges.
• Piloting partnerships with organisations of diaspora communities based in the UK in order to support them in developing programmes enabling people to volunteer in their countries of heritage.
• Strengthening VSO’s own capacity to work for the benefit of disadvantaged people by investing in staff development.
• Ambitious plans to increase our profile and funding, building on the opportunity presented by VSO’s 50th anniversary in 2008.
• Internationalising VSO, in order to become a federation of international members that can work together to maximise VSO’s impact in tackling poverty.