Why are we awarding our grantees from Future Changemakers Y4 an extra £1000 towards supporting staff wellbeing?

I’ve been at Camden Giving for 9 months now, and in those 9 months it’s become clear to me that Camden Giving is constantly evolving as a funder and the most recent step in that evolution is piloting ‘Staff Wellbeing Grants’ for current grant holders of our Future Changemakers grant.

Before I took on the role of Head of Grant Programmes, I’d received grants from Camden Giving in my previous role as Youth Programme Manager for a local charity but I wasn’t aware how young Camden Giving was as a funder. We’ve just celebrated our 5th birthday, and like any new organisation, we’ve been learning as we go. Earlier this year we changed from sector standard online end of project reports to ‘Coffee and Chat’ style reporting, where former Camden Giving panellists visit grant holders and feedback the outcomes of their visits to the core team at Camden Giving. The feedback has highlighted that a number of voluntary sector organisations in Camden feel ‘burnt out’ and some of our panellists have expressed concern about staff wellbeing at organisations they’ve visited. We aren’t the only funders to recognise this, it’s been recognised by other funders across the sector too, and last year The Tudor Trust piloted awarding some of their grant holders an additional grant restricted towards staff wellbeing with positive results.

As someone who’s benefitted from group supervision previously, having been supported by a Clinical Psychologist from The Brandon Centre in my previous role, it’s great to see the sector is thinking about staff wellbeing in a progressive way. There’s a culture of overworking in the voluntary sector, and we can be guilty of attaching our self-worth to the success of our projects without taking the time to pause, reflect or even recognise our own hard work or the hard work of the teams around us.

(Side note: I’ve recently found out the supervision I received during that time was funded by Camden Giving in 2018 with our HS2 funding)

We haven’t been prescriptive in how these grants are used, in fact, there will be no judgement on how our grant holders choose to use them, as long as they are used to benefit staff wellbeing. If an organisation would like to book some staff training, we’d support that, equally if an organisation would like to organise a series of staff meals at the end of each term, we’d support that too. I haven’t taken part in it yet, but at The Collective, the hotdesking space we use, they do weekly yoga sessions and have recently introduced ‘BrushStrokes and Bubbles’ sessions (which to my understanding means painting with prosecco ). If an organisation wanted to use their funding for anything like that, we’d support that too.

At the time of writing, we’ve had eight of our grant holders receive their ‘Staff Wellbeing Grant’. Team meals and away days have been a recurring theme, with one applicant stating that due to the nature of being largely being run by part-time staff and volunteers, some of their team members have never met one another. We are super pleased to know some of our funding will be used to bring them together as a team. Whilst we aren’t together as a team every day at Camden Giving, we tend to spend at least two full days together per week as a team and we recognise how valuable that is for our cohesion in working towards a shared mission. Other organisations have budgeted in some professional training on ‘how to practice better mental health’ and one organisation would like to use the budget to organise a space within our office operation in which staff can relax and destress.

What strikes me about the above, is these are all things you’d imagine would already exist in most budgets as standard in the private sector in Camden. I recognise the privilege in my position at Camden Giving, when I pop in to HAVAS KX to hot desk this week I’ll have access to free cereal, tea and coffee and I can even decide to play pool or table tennis on my lunch break should I wish. Some of my colleagues will make the most of the prayer room and they’ll have access to personal care products should they need them too, there will be a social event on Thursday (and every Thursday) which I can attend if I choose to and when I host my next ‘We Make Camden Kit’ panel at AutoTrader, we’ll have access to all the same amenities there too. This is starkly different to my experience of delivering frontline services in the voluntary sector in Camden.

As things develop, we’d love to see organisations feeling confident in including training, team building and wellbeing spaces for staff in their general applications for us, and are more than happy for a percentage of our annual multi-year unrestricted ‘Equality Fund’ grants to be used for staff wellbeing however as we aren’t seeing much evidence of this in the reporting we receive back yet, we felt this restricted £1000 grant towards staff wellbeing might provide some timely encouragement to our grant holders to think about their own, and their teams mental health and wellbeing and remind them that as a funder, we are here to support their wellbeing too. We’ll be asking our grantees to report back as part of their reporting in a year’s time and we look forward to providing you an update on what they’ve all spent it on.