Communities Living Sustainably in Dorset

General information

We are ready to help with a whole range of services; from local community groups, parishes or villages, with an idea or a problem to solve, to formal voluntary organisations that want to grow or change to do more for the people they support.

Dorset Community Action (DCA) is an independent voluntary organisation and charitable company.

We are governed by a Board of Trustees, and have a membership of over 250 voluntary organisations, community groups, social enterprises and local authorities from across Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole.

All voluntary and community groups are encouraged to become members, more details on our membership page.

DCA is known as the Council for Voluntary Service (CVS) and the Rural Community Council (RCC) for Dorset. This means we support the development of the voluntary sector through information, networking, representation, building capacity, and filling gaps as well as supporting and enabling initiatives in rural communities.

The services and support we offer are accessible through this website and/or our staff

We are ready to help with a whole range of services; from groups of people in their local communities, parishes or villages, with an idea or a problem to solve, to formal voluntary organisations that want to grow or change to do more for the people they support.

See how we offer Support for Voluntary Groups, Support for Communities, and Resources for more details.

This website hosts a variety of resources that are useful for community action. Have a look around. Please contact us if you have any questions or think we can help.

We have staff working across Dorset on a number of projects and programmes in various locations. From time to time we have job vacancies. Our main office is in Dorchester at Community House.

We also run the Community Learning and Resource Centre in Wimborne as an affordable and high quality venue for training, meetings and conferences.

DCA works in partnership with, and is funded by, the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Dorset's local authorities and other statutory and grant-making bodies.

We are members of both ACRE and NAVCA and hold their Quality Standard Awards, demonstrating that we deliver high quality services to the local voluntary and community sector.