Investing in TSDG
Building resilience. Enabling communities. Creating lasting impact.
Introduction
Third Sector Dumfries and Galloway (TSDG) exists to strengthen the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector that underpins life across Dumfries and Galloway. We connect people, communities, charities, social enterprises and statutory partners to ensure that no one is left behind in one of Scotland’s most rural and dispersed regions.
We do this by assisting and advising voluntary organisations in several ways to ensure they are resilient, compliant, effective, and responsive to the needs of their communities. We help organisations to strengthen their governance, secure funding, build skills, collaborate, and amplify their voice.
We know Dumfries and Galloway is a place of outstanding beauty, heritage and community spirit. However, beneath this lies a complex set of challenges that threaten wellbeing, opportunity, and social cohesion.
'The challenges facing our Dumfries and Galloway's people and place:
- One in five children lives in poverty, with deprivation often hidden across rural and coastal communities
- More than a quarter of working-age adults are economically inactive
- Rural isolation, limited transport and digital exclusion restrict access to services and employment
- Depopulation and service withdrawal are weakening towns, villages and local economies
- The cost-of-living crisis and post-COVID pressures have sharply increased demand for community support
Across Dumfries and Galloway, over 2,000 charities and community organisations deliver frontline services that people now rely on daily, from health and well-being and poverty support to transport, volunteering, employability and community regeneration.
The challenge facing charities, social enterprises, and community groups:
- Demand continues to rise whilst public sector funding to the third sector are being reduced
- Funding is increasingly short-term, restricted, and insecure, placing enormous strain on the very organisations holding our communities together.
- As the region’s Third Sector Interface, TSDG supports, strengthens and coordinates this vital ecosystem at a time when our own capacity to do so is also under financial pressure.
- The sector risks becoming overstretched, fragmented, and less able to respond to the needs of our communities without long-term, flexible investment.
Philanthropic and corporate partners can play a transformational role in developing the shared health and wealth of Dumfries and Galloway and its’ people. Whilst much of TSDG's funding comes from statutory sources, we're keen to attract private investment to help shape the additional activity which is urgently needed across the region to deliver meaningful impact across our communities.
Find out how you can get involved in making a difference to the lives of people living in Dumfries and Galloway by supporting one of our four key themes which are not funded by local or national government:
- Systems change and collaborative third sector working to develop a new person-centred way of securing skills and fair work for the people of Dumfries and Galloway who are currently out-of-work.
- Creating a bespoke volunteering service matching Dumfries and Galloway's people to volunteer ready third sector organisations.
- Supporting the voice of the people and their communities in Dumfries and Galloway through real-life stories and measuring the impact of the third sector on their lives.
- Helping deliver a community-led service tailored to new and existing social enterprises to retain wealth and health in Dumfries and Galloway.