Participatory Grants Minus the Application
It’s estimated that £900million a year is wasted on time spent filling out funding bids in the UK charity sector.
Competitive funding processes have a wider impact as well, organisations being forced to compete for funding instead of working together is a bad thing. It’s a waste of energy and hope that goes into writing an unsuccessful funding bid and hope is sparce in the charity sector right now, we need to not waste it. The entire sector is struggling at the moment, but food banks more than most don’t have time to waste on writing funding bids that go nowhere.
What is Participatory Grantmaking?
Camden Giving is a participatory grantmaker, this means that people with lived experience of issues are the ones who should decide how money is allocated to charities in Camden. It is our community panellists right to have a say on how money is distributed, but it is not an easy task. Community Panellists use their heads and hearts to make decisions, that’s not an easy task and Camden Giving has some responsibility to make that is as easy for our community panellists. This was one reason we decided to trial giving grants without written applications.
How we did it
We worked with a panel of 12 Camden residents who live across the borough and have different personal experiences of inequality, they had already formed a community panel and had been trained on awarding grants, so they weren’t completely new to grantmaking, but this process was new. A smaller sub-group was set-up to award grants to organisations who could break the cycle of food banks in one the wealthiest cities on Earth. This is the process the staff at Camden Giving facilitated.
Establishing eligible organisations
Camden has a Food Poverty Alliance and we used it’s membership as a starting point, we then asked our community panellists to suggest Camden-based organisations that might not be members of the alliance but that were working on the issue of food insecurity.
Data gathering
The staff team at Camden Giving gathered publicly available data on the long-list of organisations. In total each organisation had 14 data points against it, everything from the childhood poverty level of area of Camden they are operating in, to whether income is going up or down and information on the services they provide.
Data prioritising
Over 2 focus groups, we worked with the community panel to establish what would be the ideal “profile” of an organisation be. We then used the data to generate a shortlist of 5 organisations that matched that profile the best.
Sense making
The community panel sense-checked that the organisations that the data had recommended were right as a portfolio of grants.
Grant offer
We asked the 5 organisations if they would like to accept a grant, for our audit we required them to write a short proposal that met the criteria of the grant, but this was not competitive. The community panel created a list of back-up organisations who would be offered grants if one or more of the 5 organisations didn’t feel they could accept a grant.
The 5 organisations the community panel chose to award grants to are:
Kentish Town Community Centre
Kings Cross Brunswick Neighbourhood Association
Our Little Markets CIC
Somali Youth Development Resource Centre
Urban Community Projects
The Advantages
We saved people time. Camden has a very active Food Poverty Alliance, a membership organisation for organisations working on food poverty. The alliance has 40 members and growing, most of which would be likely to apply to Camden Giving for food poverty grants, that’s a gross waste of charitable time and energy.
This process reduced the emotional burden on our community panellists, there was a notably lighter mood in this meeting compared to previous food insecurity grant meetings. Bid writers know that stirring up emotions in people helps to put their organisation ahead of others, but this takes an emotional toll on community panellists.
The process removed competition between organisations. Our Little Market and Urban Community Projects would ordinarily be in competition with each other because they operate in a very small geographical area. Whilst that concern was discusses by the community panel, there was a sense that they were both doing exceptional things and shouldn’t been “kept small” because of their close proximity to each other. Camden has groups of noticeably smaller organisations working in areas of high need and this is in-part a reflection of competition for funds. Competitive grant processes are rooted in Victorian Philanthropy and ideas of “deserving philanthropy”, we work on the notion that everyone in Camden “deserves” to benefit from the great things that exist here, without competition.
The Disadvantages
We were acutely aware that we were stifling new organisations from coming forward and receiving funding from us. This was somewhat mitigated by the community panellists recommending organisations to us, but there might be a great idea out there in Camden that we didn’t get a chance to fund. This is the main reason we don’t expect to make this process our standard participatory grantmaking process.
We can only work like this if data is accurate and plentiful. We were in a unique position to access data relating the food poverty, but we already know we couldn’t replicate this across our service delivery model or across organisations where data isn’t easily compared. Organisations like Time To Spare and 360 Giving are helping to fill those gaps, but there’s still a long way to go.
These grant decisions were informed by things that have already happened, it’s very hard to know where an organisation wants to go in the future because that data is hard to access.
We’re committed to finding new ways for communities to have a say in how our funds are spent and this was an important part of that. We’re also really delighted that the 5 organisations have all accepted their grants have really exciting plans to break the cycle of food bank reliance in Camden.
If you’d like to find out more about how you can fund this innovation, you can get in touch with lucy@camdengiving.org.uk
If you’d like to find out how you can apply to Camden Giving for funding, you can email daniel@camdengiving.org.uk