This was co-written by Cassie Robinson and Hannah Paterson.
In the report published yesterday by Onward they analyse the records of different regeneration schemes since the 1960s. It finds that “the most successful regeneration schemes ensure communities have a stake in the regeneration process, including by putting local people in charge of priorities, devolving budgets, and building new community-level institutions.” As a result they make a set of recommendations that include “ensure neighbourhoods can take a more active role in supporting local regeneration through the levelling up agenda.”
Similarly, a recent report released by the Institute for Community Studies found…
Back to school and back on the writing train
Back at work for some of this week after taking most of August as holiday and I’m slowly catching up. I just can’t work at the pace I used to and I expect that’s a good thing. I loved this tweet from Elizabeth Sawin and being reminded by Panthea Lee of this tweet —
In the Autumn there are a number of things I want to explore and focus on, alongside ensuring everything else I mentioned in my previous blog is being stewarded.
In my work at The National Lottery Community Fund
Growing Great Ideas
Now that the funding programme is open my focus will now be on three key areas.
- When you work for a NDPB and you are spending public money, there is no way around evidencing value and progress in some way — it’s called being accountable, ensuring integrity, and most of all, ensuring learning and adaptation. So we’ll be working alongside our Evaluation team, the grantees, and some external experts to design…
I’ve never worked as hard in the year between April 2020 (when I took on my previous role) and March 2021 (when I started my new/current role as Deputy Director Funding Strategy, Innovation, Policy + Practice). Over the course of that year, I started work on a number of different projects, partnerships, and infrastructures which are all now out in the world. …
Written by Sian Williams, UK Portfolio — The National Lottery Community Fund
Narratives have the power to change heart and minds. They are the overarching ideas and themes that guide us, shape our culture, and help us make sense of the world. They are also a critical ingredient in effecting transformational change, helping to underpin and guide the behaviour of the system. Yet, efforts around narrative work in the not-for-profit sector are falling short of what is needed to tackle society’s urgent challenges.
There has been a tendency to focus on individual stories and individual perspectives, while campaigns have often…
In last week’s second instalment in the Dark Matter of Funding series, we were joined by Alex Sutton (Head of Programme, Migration at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation) and Rowan Conway (Head of MOIN network at IIPP and Lecturer in Transformation by Design, among other things). Chaired once again by Indy Johar (Co-Founder and Executive Director of Dark Matter Labs), the session explored impact more deeply, investigating its relationship with theories of change and with the idea of the ‘mission’.
Alex discussed the way his understanding of impact has been influenced…
The Civil Society Open Enquiries were announced by TNLCF in October 2020, in this blog post, as an open space for civil society to sense, feel and iterate our way into the future together. The many long crises our society now faces — Covid-19, climate change, deep social inequity and biodiversity loss, to mention just a few — make for a continued state of heightened uncertainty and unpredictability likely well into the future.
In this context, the Open Enquiries explored five areas of uncertainty in relation to the future of the Fund’s work. Rather than seeing uncertainty as a problem…
On Wednesday evening, we hosted the first of our Dark Matter of Funding sessions, this one on impact — how we measure it, what it’s own impacts are, and even, in this complex, emergent and increasingly unpredictable world, what impact even means, and whether it’s a useful frame.
Joining the conversation with Indy (who provided thoughtful yet probing questions), were Deputy CEO of Social Investment Business and Associate Lecturer at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, Gen (Genevieve) Maitland Hudson, and Kieron Boyle, CEO of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation and Co-Founder of Impact on Urban Health…
A super short blog, mostly to organise my own thoughts, having read a few others’ this weekend from the brilliant Lingjing and Sam about ‘visibility.’
One of the things that has brought me most unhappiness in the last year or so has been the tension between wanting to do what feels important for the work, versus my preference to be at the edge of things and more under the radar. Anyone that’s known me since before I was a ‘funder’ will know that I never did public speaking, I was highly connected in a vast network, but more underground —…
Anything that looks to improve the practices of foundations is A Good Thing in my book, so I was really interested to read about this new piece of work which will rate the performance of UK grant-making foundations on their accountability, transparency and diversity, being led by Friends Provident Foundation. I also appreciate that they are looking for input, so I guess this blog post is mine. I will do the survey, but wanted to share openly too because … transparency!
These are the things I’d like to see, based on my personal experience of being a grant seeker and…
