36 —
By: Cassie Robinson.
Tags: Policy, Design, Philanthropy, Community, Funding

36 —

We’ve got a lot of new people joining or working with the UK Portfolio, which is great, both in terms of bringing in new thinking but also it means that there are more people to do the work!

Maddy has joined to work some of the week on the Climate Action Fund and some of the week on our policy and practice work.

Ashar is going to be working closely with Hannah generating evidence, learning and insights across our Participatory Grantmaking experiments.

Catherine, George and Will are working on the Emerging Futures Fund with us.

Carrie, Suzy, Rachel and Ellie are working with us on the Civil Society Approach, and in particular on the Open Enquiries.

In relation to our Civil Society Approach we have other pieces of work starting —

Tracey, Ade and Edafe are looking at impacted communities and technology. This is work that’s been in the pipeline for nearly a year, as part of the Digital Fund, but needed to be pushed back due to the pandemic. It feels more relevant than ever as the pandemic has pushed more communities online and highlighted further inequities.

Eirini is just starting a piece of work with us looking at the relationship between climate action, data and technology.

Mumbi and Debs have been doing some research on infrastructure — a more expansive view of what infrastructure is, and what is needed in terms of infrastructure now.

What I’ve been doing

Highlights of the week include —

My last one-to-one with Dawn. When she asked me how I was, I had to say ‘grumpy’ because whilst I am so pleased for her that she can move on having left a brilliant legacy, I’m going to miss working with her!

I met Motaz through the Building Belonging philanthropy group and this week we had a one-to-one sharing more about work he’s doing at Garfield Foundation and I shared more about the funds we are opening in the new year.

Speaking of the Building Belonging group, we had our penultimate session on Friday and I am feeling the loss already! I’m hoping we stay connected as a group because it’s one of the few philanthropy communities I’ve valued being in.

I’m part of a small group exploring collective wisdom, with Geoff, Gemma, Liam, Sylvie, Rufus and others. It’s always quite a leap to make, out of my day job, and in to that kind of space but I really value it and would love to find ways of bringing collective wisdom practices in to more communities across the UK.

I attended two different sessions of “Mince Pies and Democracy chat” with My Society this week — one with other funders (with an intro from Peter Geoghegan from Open Democracy and author of Democracy for Sale) and one with people working around ‘democracy’ and ‘active citizenship’ in the UK.

Julie from Ariadne interviewed me for their yearly forecast. It’s the only forecast for next year that I have come across so far. I expect that is because many of the yearly forecasts definitely hadn’t predicted the pandemic!

I joined the Fund’s Board meeting, though barely said a word! I was just there to accompany Emma who did an update on the Civil Society Approach, got a steer from them, and we can now keep moving forward with it.

We had an initial call with Joycelyn from Climate In Colour who we’re hoping to work with on our Climate Action Fund. She’s so impressive — within a year has created a community of 16,000 people, all kinds of online events and content, alongside starting an MRes + PhD at Cambridge to study the application of Artificial Intelligence to Climate Change, with a particular interest in empowering and supporting indigenous and developing communities.

The Digital Fund team hosted a ‘roundtable’ with a group of other funders to share a year of work trying to embed tech, data and digital policy and practice across the Fund. I still love Melissa’s Little Wins blog that brings some of this to life in the early days.

I had a brilliant call with Henrietta Ross (thanks Cat!) — Course Leader on MA Data Visualisation at LCC who’s going to get involved with ways to visualise data across the Emerging Futures Fund and our new ‘ecologies’ funding that opens early in the new year. As I have written about often now, I don’t think it’s always about simplifying language but about finding other ways to bring concepts to life. Visualising things is a powerful way to do that.

It’s always a pleasure catching up with Jake at Paul Hamlyn Foundation — he’s the grants manager for my Ideas + Pioneers Award and I absolutely love his enquiring mind and really appreciate his ongoing support. More plans are hopefully afoot for the Stewarding Loss work.

I spent a lot of Friday working on the Funders Collaborative Hub — first connecting two of my colleagues Alex and Jenny to the Hub team, so that they can move forward with another funder ‘ cluster’ focussed on organisational and community resilience. In the afternoon, Nick, Tom, Will, Ab and I spent time mapping out funder ‘user journey’s’ — what are the touch points of co-operation, coordination, collective awareness and collaboration? And how can we design for a shift in funder behaviours at each of the different touch points? I’m looking forward to turning this into a set of resources that will sit on the Hub.

Questions I am asking

1 — Provenance of Lottery money into our grant holders consciousness?

Since working at The National Lottery Community Fund I notice how accountable and responsible I feel in relation to the money we’re distributing. Every day I consider who’s money it is, and I carry that around with me. I’ve been wondering how to make that more present in the minds (and hearts!) of those we grant the funding too. All of our grant holders are reminded that it’s National Lottery player’s money when they receive it, but that’s often done through a brand and PR lens. What are the different ways that the accountability for the money can travel through the duration of the grant — so that there is a sense of ongoing responsibility to use the funding care-fully, wisely, and so that it is making the most possible difference in communities?

2 — What does ‘policy + practice’ mean in the Fund’s context?

Having done a summary of the UK Portfolio for our UK Funding Committee a few weeks back, and considering our role in the new Funding Strategy Directorate, I’ve been considering what ‘policy + practice’ means in the context of our work. I’ve been looking back at writing about strategic design, reminding myself of what it encompasses, about where policy and design overlap, and reminding myself of the work of Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office. I’m wondering what the latest work is on where design and policy meets?

3 — Ownership and belonging?

This was a question I was asking this week. There are so many brilliant and thought-provoking responses that you can see here. I’m just trying to organise them all, which I will also share in an open doc when finished.