I’ve just finished three years at The National Lottery Community Fund where I worked from November 2018 until November 2021. I was initially hired as Head of the Digital Fund, then was promoted to Senior Head of UK Portfolio, and my last role was a promotion to Deputy Director of…
Back in September 2021 I co-hosted one of the Philea Community of Practice sessions I run. The focus of the conversation was to explore what it means to fund the ‘third horizon.’ Obviously the perfect guest speaker for this was Graham Leicester. It was a rich discussion so I wanted…
This was too long for a tweet but maybe too short for a blog! I wanted to share it though.
Friendship is the most important thing to me. I cherish my friends and take the practice of friendship very much to heart. The pandemic changed what’s been possible and whilst…
In my last few weeks at TNLCF I co-wrote a blog that highlighted the role participatory grantmaking could play in ‘levelling up’ — explored here. As Onward put it in their recent report ‘Turnaround’, communities need to be able to take back control of their futures to ensure engagement with…
Sophia shared a few weeks back about the work I’ll be doing with JRF and with a growing group of partners. I’m really glad that a foundation like JRF is investing in this field and especially at this time.
My journey to this work
The Emerging Futures Fund, that we set up at TNLCF in Spring 2020, in that first wave of the pandemic, is one of the programmes I get asked most about, so I thought I’d do a quick summary of things I learnt.
For those not familiar with the programme, it…
“The definition of impact that has that legitimacy to say this is a good future, this is a bad future — how do you track the social legitimacy of that? I don’t know what that future looks like, so I think we’re bridging into the fog, an unknown landscape and…
In the third session of Reconsidering the Dark Matter of Funding, we continued exploring questions of impact, accountability, measurement and evidence. What do they mean? Are these framings still fit for purpose in a world where we are increasingly aware of the centrality of complexity and entanglement? What if…
Some of my work was about building more capacity internally to think differently and longer-term, to use strategic foresight and outsight, and to resource communities to also think beyond what they can know, feel, imagine or understand in the responsive present. To address this, over the last 18 months at…
Running the UK Portfolio which was the focus of my second role and part of my third role at the Fund meant looking after a whole range of Funding programmes, which I wrote about here.
In April 2020 when I took on this role we only had a few funding…
