Designing funds for resilience: lessons from the VAWG grassroots sector
“[Resilience means] that our survivors are thriving, and they no longer need our services…it means we are not dependent on this cyclical funding all the time, because our work never stops.” - VAWG organisation manager and co-design session participant
After seven years of devastating cuts to public services, schools and the voluntary sector, 2017 saw the demand for women’s services in the UK rise by 83%, while funding fell again by 50%. To make matters worse, 15% of all recorded sexual offences in the UK take place in London, but only 6% of government funding is typically spent on the capital.[1] The specialist service providers in the grassroots sector who support particular communities of women are responding to increased and more complex needs, yet specific services for minoritised communities, for example, are disproportionately affected by funding challenges.
The women who run these services, many of whom are survivors themselves, are fighting an uphill battle to advise, shelter and support their clients to help them get through the worst and land on their feet. We were lucky enough to meet 70 of these inspiring women when we ran a number of co-design sessions in January and February that sought to determine what a new VAWG Grassroots Fund should look like.
In response to all the cuts to the sector, Sadiq Khan invested £15 million into fighting violence against women and girls in the capital – and £3 million of that has been committed to supporting the grassroots sector, comprised of smaller, specialist community organisations. In MOPAC’s new VAWG Grassroots Fund administered by the London Community Foundation (LCF), a minimum of 60% of funds will go toward supporting organisations led 'by and for' minoritised communities. The idea is that these organisations already know what they need and should be involved in designing the Fund’s application process, its priorities, the capacity building and learning programme and the evaluation process.
Co-designing a new VAWG Grassroots Fund
Over three weeks and five co-design sessions, we heard from over 70 grassroots organisations representing 23 of the 32 boroughs in London. They told us that the Fund’s application process must be accessible and inclusive, with a range of support options available, including simple and sector-appropriate forms. Criteria and scoring process should be transparent, with VAWG experts – majority representatives from minoritised communities – on the panel. The Fund should award flexible grants and fund long-term preventative work, as well as crisis response.
They also told us that capacity building sessions should be led by the needs of grantees, and if they require staff attendance, should either be held locally or online and should be remunerated. Capacity building events should emphasise, encourage and facilitate partnership working across the sector, as well as provide grantees with the opportunity to network with key decision-makers like other funders, larger VAWG organisations, universities and policymakers. It should also address staff and volunteer wellbeing through coaching, mentoring, clinical supervision and wellbeing events.
Finally, they said that evaluation support should take multiple forms and be led by organisational need, accounting for the need for different kinds of measurement for crisis intervention and long-term support. The reporting method should include one easy template or tool – coined a ‘Truth Kit’ by Polly Harrar, Founder of The Sharan Project – that rewards honesty and is gender and trauma-informed. There should also be more options for face-to-face visits or phone calls with the funder so they can witness the impact of services first-hand.
Addressing challenges around trust, health and wellbeing
The atmosphere of the co-design sessions was tense at points. The representatives of the organisations that were present are overworked. They are underpaid and under-resourced. They are doing extremely challenging work and are often forced by funders to jump through additional hoops that take away from their time on the front line. There is a sense that funders, consultants and other larger organisations rarely understand the situation at a grassroots level, where the Director is also the bid writer and the social media officer and a caseworker. We were therefore unsurprised that some people arrived feeling suspicious of whether their voices would truly be heard.
To address this, we named it: we strived to build trust by being clear from the outset about which aspects of the Fund were possible to influence and which were not; by providing a space for people to share their grievances about their past experience with various funds; and by trying to take in, record and feedback as much as we possibly could, as accurately as we possibly could, to the funder.
In response to COVID-19, the lockdown and the additional challenges these frontline organisations are now facing, we decided to bring them back to discuss the new needs that have emerged as a result of the pandemic. What stood out the most to us was a real need from the funding sector to directly support the health and wellbeing of the teams delivering these services, either as part of core funding or as an add-on to building resilience across the sector.
Lessons for funders supporting the grassroots sector
There are wider lessons here for funders and organisations supporting the grassroots sector. The first is that regulations and processes set up with larger organisations in mind (e.g. disproportionately frequent reporting, turnover eligibility, etc.) often undermine the success of smaller charities when it comes to bidding for funding, and ultimately, their financial sustainability. The second is that the grassroots sector is unique because it largely exists to serve members of its own community, and their teams are therefore representative of their client base. There is an expectation, then, that funds which are aimed at them should have decision-making panels and fund leads who reflect the diversity and expertise of the organisations who are expected to apply. The final lesson is that co-design – in order to avoid tokenism – needs to happen from the start. Service providers know what they need and should be given space to share those needs and to be genuinely heard, and funders should listen intently and respond accordingly.
If funders want to foster resilience within the grassroots sector, they must start from the ground up: what have these organisations been saying for years – and why aren’t they being heard? How can bureaucratic processes be adjusted to allow for more diverse expertise to be supported? How can capacity building programmes be built to strengthen frontline work, instead of taking time away from it? We were excited by the fact that MOPAC and LCF were up for the challenge of trying to answer these questions through co-design.
So, it is with absolute pleasure that MOPAC, LCF and TSIP launch the VAWG Grassroots Fund today – with a prospectus and plan for continued collaboration that has been jointly designed with the incredible ‘by and for’ organisations that support so many women across London.
You can find out more about applying for the fund here: https://londoncf.org.uk/grants/vawg-grassroots-fund and on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/London_cf
[1] https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/mayors-15m-boost-to-tackle-violence