Investing in Stronger Communities Across Dumfries and Galloway 

Introduction 

Building resilience. Enabling communities. Creating lasting impact. 

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 region: 

• 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 mental health and poverty support to transport, volunteering, employability and community regeneration. 

The challenge facing the third sector: 

While demand continues to rise, public sector budgets are being reduced, and statutory funding is increasingly short-term, restricted and insecure. This places enormous strain on the very organisations holding 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. Without long-term, flexible investment, the sector risks becoming overstretched, fragmented and less able to respond to emerging need. 

Philanthropic and corporate partners can play a transformational role in developing the shared health and wealth of Dumfries and Galloway and its’ people.