Civil Society Support Organisations (CSSOs) look to provide infrastructure support to enable frontline services to do their work. However, in recent years, this has become more challenging - the underfunded sector has overstretched resources against growing demand.

The grant-giving and charitable body, City Bridge Foundation (then City Bridge Trust), commissioned TSIP to undergo an initial scoping and co-design process, with up to 25 different CSSO’s, to understand their needs and thoughts for a new Fund that sought to provide long-term funding opportunities to the sector.

The co-design and scoping process was two-fold:

An initial roundtable discussion over the course of five weeks, in April 2022 to develop a draft specification.
Facilitating five sessions over five weeks with an Advisory Panel in November 2022 to further refine the specification and application process

Our work aimed to provide the capacity, resources and infrastructure to support the process of unpacking and developing what this Fund would resemble with an overarching sentiment of engaging directly with experts by experience.

Our work in April:

Our initial approach to scoping the design of the Fund was iterative and combined the principles of co-design and participatory research. Across the five weeks, we used these principles to foster both collaboration and reflection - the design of the Fund created space for the 25 organisations to share their funding experiences, what they thought good practice within funding applications looked like amongst conversations on how to make the process as accessible as possible.

While we developed the intended outcomes for each session, we adapted our approach and activities as each session progressed, creating space for the participants to set the direction of the discussion. This often filled the (virtual) room with rich conversation, yielding both breadth of experience and depth of insight. In letting go of the need to be in control and directive, we created space for authenticity and for meaningful conversations and relationships to emerge.

Our approach also addressed the apparent power dynamics of those in the room which is fundamental in any co-design process. By working collaboratively with City Bridge Foundation (hereafter The Foundation), we were able to set the tone of conversationality and mediate the space between the ‘funder’ and the ‘grantee’. The Trust’s unique approach to this work prompted discussions on how this Fund can begin to disrupt the status quo.

As earlier mentioned, the outcome of the co-design process was a draft specification that pulled together the findings from the five weeks.

Responses from participants to the question: “What does it mean to be a civil society support organisation?”

Our work in Nov/Dec 2022:

Moving forward to our most recent project, we worked with 7 CSSO’s, some of whom had been part of the initial co-design, and other newer ones and looked to utilise the expertise of the panel to unpack various elements of the Fund, including:

The eligibility and description of the programme.
The expression of interest and application form of the Fund.
The potential guidance and comms for the Fund.
The monitoring processes for the Fund.

To think disruptively is to reimagine a new way of working and across the various panel sessions, we created the capacity to rethink how this Fund can best alter the current landscape. The distribution of funding, within the sector, has traditionally focussed on organisations with specific factors, credentials and resources. This Fund looked to offer the alternative, and through the scrutiny process driven by the Advisory Panel, we were able to provide capacity for honest reflections.

Our approach was led by panellists who represented different and diverse spaces within the sector. The purposeful conversations were mutually beneficial to the process of scrutiny but also to the long-term thinking of the implementation of the Fund.

Our growing and positive relationship with the Foundation enabled us to take accountability and ensure that the purpose, vision and mission of the Fund was not lost. With the input of the Foundation across the various sessions, the transparency created amongst the group enabled us to fulfil the key aims required of the panel and ultimately propose meaningful recommendations to the Fund such as setting clear criteria for those organisations eligible to receive funding, prioritising communications and messaging of this Fund to ensure they are reaching the whole sector and establishing clear definitions of sector specific words i.e. second tier organisations.

What’S next?

As we moved forward to combine our learnings from the Advisory Panel, we transitioned into becoming the learning partner for this programme. The Anchor Programme was launched and TSIP began this work in the Autumn of 2023! We are really looking forward to our continued relationship with City Bridge Foundation, alongside engaging and meeting the diverse organisations from cohort 1 of this Fund - stay tuned for updated blog posts about our learnings.

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