35 —
By: Cassie Robinson.
Tags: Ecology, Design, Philanthropy, Community, Funding

I have to say that it felt amazing to a) not to need to do anything myself and b) be reminded of just what an excellent team the UK Portfolio is. I’m leaving this year feeling very grateful for them.

One of my favourite parts of the day was being visited by some of the UK Portfolio grantees. Children’s Law Centre from the Digital Fund and then two initiatives from the Emerging Futures Fund. I loved the way Rahab from Gentle Radical talked about their work.

“We shouldn’t patronise our communities, people want to feel they are being engaged in complex and nuance. This is important. What the ecology of that means is that we need to find the spaces in which that can happen. And that the ecology stays alive enough for people to feed into it and start shaping it. Ecologies can develop kind of tentacles across lots of different spaces.” — Rahab

And we were lucky to have the whole crew from Barrow’s New Constellation. Natalie from Barrow spoke about how timely the Emerging Futures Fund grant is —

“We face huge challenges in health inequalities, and we’re actually one of the first Local Authorities to declare a poverty emergency. The New Constellation for Barrow gives us hope, a space to dream big as a community, and to work our way through big questions. It’s also timely because just on the horizon is how we spend the £25 million we’ve been given from the Towns Fund — which will be a way to start realising these community dreams.”

One of the many engagement that Barrow’s New Constellation has been doing in advance of the ‘voyage’ they will go on together.

Questions I am asking

How do you create an ‘Insights Engine’ across an 850 person organisation?

The National Lottery Community Fund has so much interesting data about communities across the UK. For our Civil Society Approach we are needing to bring together so many different strands of data from across the fund —

Data from our Grant Management System

Data from our Customer Insights team

Data from our Knowledge + Learning teams

Data from our User Research team

Data from our “Three Horizons” Scanning + Sensing Network

Data from the Emerging Futures Fund

Data from our Evaluation Team and the CCSF Hub

Data from our Policy team

Data from the Civil Society Approach Open Enquiries team

Data from the Open Org Development work we’ve commissioned

Data from things our grant holders share with us

Data generated by local and regional teams through insights work they are doing

Data from the work we will soon be kicking of with Sensemaker and Cognitive Edge

And there will no doubt be things I have missed! So how do we effectively and meaningfully bring together all this very different data being generated, structure it in useful ways so as to synthesise and sense-make, and then ensure that some of it can be acted on, operationalised, and shared back and built upon in a continuous feedback loop with communities and wider civil society?

It’s a huge design challenge and I would love to hear from others’ working in large organisations that have found ways to do this well.

Who else is funding ecologies, assemblages, ecosystems, constellations and everyday infrastructure?

We’re in the development phase of a new funding programme that will open in January. We’ve been designing it since the summer, doing lots of interviews with the wider sector, developing and testing language, criteria, application questions alongside exploring what equity means in this context, what governance looks like, what needs to be considered from a legal perspective, and what kinds of support the grantees would need. It’s been a great imagination exercise — to really think about what kind of funding leads to deep, transformative change.

We’ve developed this adapted Geels Socio-technical Transitions Theory as a way of orienting people towards what we’re looking to fund — collective initiatives that work at multiple levels. I’m keen to speak with other funders that have or are looking to fund in this way. Imagine too, if we can use a visual on an application form!