Government and Civil Society Enabling Participation Together
Yesterday I attended Downing Street as the Prime Minister and Cabinet Members for Culture Media and Sport, Lisa Nandy, shared plans to create a Civil Society Covenant. The big hope being that government can find a better way of working with the for-good sector.
In Camden we’ve been developing g a stronger relationship with local government over the last 7 years and there’s a lot to learn from.
Natasha Friend outside Downing Street.
Camden is a pretty special place for lots of reasons, if you’ve watched the sun go down from Primrose Hill or stocked up on sweets from Drummond Street, then you already know that. What you may not know is that it’s also a special place because for 4 years local government have worked in a mission-led way and together we’ve developed a way that businesses, civil society and citizens work together to achieve things that none of us can achieve together. And it’s working, in the last 4 years the participatory fund we run has given 400 citizens the resources they need to provide interventions for tens of thousands of other citizens, not delivered by big faceless charities, but by their neighbours.
What we’re all doing in Camden isn’t a blueprint for other local places, but it does provide a set of tools that national and local government can use to bring missions to life in places.
Here’s how it works in Camden
First of all, it’s important to bust the myth that Camden is a wealthy place. Some people here do hold a lot of wealth, but 43% of the people who living here are experiencing poverty, the highest percentage in London and well above the national average.
Camden Giving was set-up to address that inequality. We started with funding from City Bridge Foundation. The plan was to provide a deep, rich insight into local issues in order to support Camden’s businesses to have a meaningful impact. The way we do that is by getting funding to people and organisations addressing local issues. We’ve always been a participatory grantmaker, meaning that local people with first hand experience of the issues we’re addressing are the ones who decide how and what we give funding and support to.
This means as businesses grow, they provide funds that combine with the knowledge of local communities to achieve missions that are important to this place we share.
Local people make better funding decisions than most government departments, citizens are uniquely placed to spot great ideas that will achieve the missions in their communities. Putting local people in charge of how funds are spent is much more important than the outcome of the funds, in Camden we’ve worked with 350 people to award grants, and they tell us it’s improved their wellbeing, their confidence and their understanding of other people’s lives in their communities. In short, it is uniting people around shared goals, not diving societies
But this magic didn’t happen without government, far from it. Moving this forward took political leadership that was willing to put trust into people and understand local governments role as an enabler, not a service provider. The council formed the co-created missions, seed funded the grants pot and most importantly convened and encouraged private funds to flow to towards the missions. Camden Council has created a culture that celebrates participation and citizen social action, so officers feel they can take risks in order to make participation happen.
The Prime Minister announcing the Civil Society Covenant yesterday.
Place-Based Giving
Camden Giving is part of a growing number of place-based-giving organisations, leveraging their deep local knowledge to get funding and support to issues that matter locally. Many of the London organisations have benefitted from funding from City Bridge Foundation, beyond the capital many sprung up from DCMS funding trials into local giving.
The independence of these organisations means they can build trust with communities in a ways that government struggles to do and they can develop the sort of local knowledge that no national or regional philanthropic organisations could do.
From Stoke to Sutton, Hartlepool to Harrow, place-based-giving already exists, but it doesn’t exist everywhere, this thin spread is barely scratching the surface of the possibilities to build social cohesion through grantmaking.
Opportunities
1. Invest in Place-Based-Giving across the country. In doing so, government can ensure that local places have the infrastructure they need to attract private philanthropy and business funding. It’s great to see ‘Participation’ is one of the four high level principles of the Civil Society Covenant, to bring this to life government need to ensure that civil society has the infrastructure to support participations that goes beyond the usual people. This could be done through Lottery funds, or directly through DCMS, but we will cannot expect place-based giving organisations to grow organically across the whole country, and we therefore miss the opportunity to spend funds in a locally-informed way.
2. Enable the Lottery and governmental to devolve funds through local Place-Based-Giving schemes. This happens in some places, but is often clunky and met with a nervousness that public funds shouldn’t be spent by the public. There’s a fear amongst government bodies that citizens won’t spend money well and a myth that governments funds can’t be spent by citizens. We need to move towards a more trusting place where government trusts citizens to make decisions (and mistakes) on how funds are spent, and in turn citizens will return that trust in government institurions.
3. Impose requirements on developers to financially support place-based-giving. How that funding is spent should be decided by local people who have first-hand experience of the missions. Many of the businesses that have supported this work in Camden are not headquartered here, they are land developers and builders, the industry that stand to grow as the Labour government plan to “get Britain building again”. As they form part of the government’s strategy for growth, they can also play an important role in Civil Society Covenant.
You can find out more about London Giving here.
Read more about Camden Giving’s approach to participation here.
Full details on the Civil Society Covenant are here.