Investing in Communities - Strength, Growth and Partnerships

Session 1: Introductory Session

In the first meeting in November we aimed to do two things: agree on our ways of working and decide what we wanted to achieve with this investment.

Our ways of working conversation helped us to bring out two core principles along with some of the more predictable ones:

• “Good enough for now, safe enough to try”
• “This is bigger than us”

These principles have been highlighted throughout the co-design process to enable us to make progress and move forward and consider those who aren’t in the room.

When starting to talk about purpose, some strong themes came through the conversation:

• “Trust” this investment should be used in a way that demonstrates trust in organisations to use the funds
• “Learning” the fund should be focused on learning rather than strict monitoring or “bums on seats”
• Many participants said that they wanted this funding to enable collaboration and shared resources and infrastructure
• There was also a clear tension between using this funding to meet organisations’ immediate needs and keep their doors open or using this as an investment into organisations’ capacity and sustainability.

We didn’t manage to agree on the purpose at this meeting, and decided to follow up with the group during one-to-one calls to hear different perspectives outside of the group setting.

Some of the feedback on this meeting was for officers to talk less and create more space for conversation, which we took on board full heartedly for the following sessions.

Session 2: Purpose

In January the Task and Finish group discussed two streams of funding that had emerged during Session 1 and our one-to-ones.

• Immediate Needs
• Future-proofing

For each stream we spoke about:

1. What we would want to achieve with this stream
2. What type of thing we might fund
3. How we prioritise what we fund

Throughout the session, one message became clear: you can’t separate funding immediate needs from future-proofing. When organisations are under pressure financially, or struggling to meet demand, this often means that leaders spend their time firefighting

Session 3: Process

This session in March generated some really useful recommendations for how this fund should be managed.

The group worked on six stations around the room to discuss:

• How organisations / groups apply for funding
• How proposals are selected
• How much organisations / groups could apply for
• What we won’t fund
• Due diligence / organisation health
• How we support and encourage partnerships / collaboration

Technical Group

In April we started working with a smaller technical group with representatives from the VCFSE with experience in governance and grant-giving to take forward the recommendations from the Task and Finish Group. This group formed while a restructure was announced on the council Grants team, which meant we needed to be pragmatic in our approach while staying as true to the recommendations of the original group as possible.

This group reflected on the outputs from the Task and Finish Group to firm up the plans for this investment:

• Funding Tiers
• Applications
• Proposal Criteria
• A Supportive Process

We also worked with this group to define three separate pots:

1. Smaller Grants <£5k
2. Main Grants Pot £5k-£50k
3. Partnerships and Collaboration up to £100k

After some discussion about the need for small grants of less than £5000 with other opportunities like Ward Pots available, we agreed as a group to use a small portion of the total fund to enable South Yorkshire Community Foundation to support eligible Sheffield-based applications from a highly oversubscribed grant fund. This felt like a pragmatic use of the funding, with applications already written and assessed.