22 —

It’s strange being back in the UK, and in quarantine, after 6 weeks in France. I’m not actually at home in London yet as I live in a shared house, so it may just be that, but I feel oddly disconnected from being here, on this soil, in this country. A country I increasingly feel I belong to less or can identify with.

On an entirely different note, I am in the process of scoping out what a ‘Horizon Scanning’ unit, with communities and wider civil society centred at the heart of it, would look like. We’re hoping to seed fund one, in partnership with some other Trusts and Foundations, that can be used both by funders, but also by communities — and ultimately to ensure that communities are able to anticipate and shape the future. Does anyone have any examples of good models for this? I’d love to hear from people if they do.

What I’ve been doing

• I’ve been working half days again all week before I go back to full-time hours from Monday. Even still, I had 10 hours of internal meetings this week.
• Lots of my meetings this week have been with the different teams in my portfolio, reviewing their strategy canvas’s ahead of our team away-days in a few weeks time.
• This week a group of us in my team started to lay out a new page on our corporate website that will be solely focussed on grantmaking practice where we will be sharing our materials of things like Digital Grantmaking, Participatory Grantmaking, how to design with and fund Leaders With Lived Experience and about the practice of funding ecosystems etc. I’m really excited about this as we’ve been developing a lot of good content over the last year that hasn’t had a proper home, and that I also believe will be useful (and open source) for other grant makers.
• We had the kick off meeting for the Emerging Futures Fund which I write about more below.
• And at the weekly meeting of the Funders’s Collaborative Hub we saw the MVP of the digital platform which will help support the overall ambition of the Hub. It looked great. This last week I’ve also had 5 colleagues from across the Fund get in touch wanting to be involved in the Hub too — especially in joining or setting up ‘spokes.’ Spokes are currently geographic or thematic, and the name we’ve given to clusters of Funders wanting to align around shared ambitions.
• We finally brought together 14 people from across the Fund who will make up the ‘Civil Society Strategy’ working group, which you’ll start to hear more about. I’m spending a day a week on this from now on.

What’s been important this week

It’s amazing to see a funding programme become a reality. We conceived of the idea late-April, received sign off in May and this week we brought all 52 grantees together for the first time and marked the start of this journey.

I began the session by acknowledging that whilst this Fund is oriented towards the future and tinged with hope — how do we start to re-imagine and build — there has been the loss of so much human life, and many people (likely the number will increase) still living in crisis. I also did an acknowledgement towards future generations, inspired by the Long Time Project.

We had some great feedback during the session, shared below. The 52 grantees are under a ‘comms embargo’ at the moment, but hopefully by the end of next week we’ll be able to share them all.

“This is so great in timing and in ambition.”

“This is so exciting — the first funding programme I’ve seen like it.”

“The potential of what we can do as a group here is phenomenal — so much creativity, so much diversity, so much ambition.”

“The attention to detail in how you’ve framed this — the language — the approach — the intent — it’s spot on. Well done.”

As IVAR said in their latest briefing “Now and for the future, decision makers need to respect the complexity — to look, listen and pay attention.” This fund was always intended to be a way of doing that at scale, with communities across the UK being given the resources to bring what they hope for to life. And as my slide shows, we hope this can seed an infrastructure that will establish itself as a place decision makers draw on if they are paying attention to communities across the UK.

We’ve also thought carefully about the things we can do to support the 100’s of communities we had to turn down from the Emerging Futures Fund. One of those things has been to commission Resolve Collective to create an open source toolkit for communities to use for collective listening, storytelling and imagining. These are sneak peaks of some pages from the prototype that we will be launching next week on TNLCF website and at our first Community Listening event.

What I’ve learned this week

This week has been a really good week, which I don’t think I’ve felt for a while. So I’m grateful for that. This has partly been to do with the Emerging Futures Fund kick off and some wonderful feedback we had from that, my monthly one-to-one with Dawn which was supportive and reassuring, Dawn being happy with a new framing for one of our funding programmes — Growing Great Ideas — which will reopen later this year (well done Chris in my team who’s been leading that) and a workshop yesterday afternoon with a new partner I’ve secured for the Fund that I’m especially excited about. It will be the first of its kind for the Fund too.

I also have a new boss (having only had an interim one since being in this role the last 5 months )— the new Funding Strategy Director. This not only means I now have someone with time to really support me personally, the UK Portfolio also has a member of SMT who can represent them and ensure we’re properly connected into and well positioned across the whole organisation. I have probably spent about 50% of my time the last 5 months doing this kind of work, which is exhausting and pretty thankless — mainly because it’s often less understood and much less visible. Lastly, it’s a new Directorate, in that we’ve not had a Funding Strategy Director in role since January 2020, and the purpose of that role, and therefore the role of the Directorate, is going to shift. It’s a really good place for us to sit within the fund and with a new combination of other teams to collaborate with.

We are opening our office again from the 14th September and I love the principles that the Fund is using (well done People Team!) —

Choice

Returning to an office will remain your choice. This is opt-in and will need to be balanced with the needs of teams and our customers.

Safety first

We’ll all need to plan our attendance in advance. This will be managed locally for each office to ensure we don’t exceed safe occupancy levels and can track and trace if needed.

Supporting each other

Everyone will need to take responsibility for ensuring a safe working environment. We’ll all need to follow the guidance and look after each other.

Listen, adapt and improve

We’ll listen and gather feedback in the initial stages. As we go forward we’ll sustain and build improvements to the way we work — ultimately increasing flexibility and choice for everyone.

I’m going to leave you with some statements that different friends have sent me over the last few weeks to support me in my job , in case they are of use to others.

“How (or how not) you spend your time is reflective of what matters to you.”

“Your complexities get to co-exist beyond the assumptions made about them.”

“In the midst of normalising and validating, keep holding that space for what else is possible.”

“You do not need to take responsibility for what isn’t your responsibility.”

“Honour your vastness. Remember your complexity. Hold your layers. Acknowledge your depth. See your undefinability. You are more than the limits that have been placed on you.”