Community Regeneration and Resilience in Scotland

I signed up to SURF’s conference with a mix of curiosity and trepidation. There certainly was not going to be much to celebrate with an agenda focused on the significant and growing financial pressures facing our sector compounded by ongoing cost of living impacts and rising levels of unmet need within communities.

It was for sure a sombre atmosphere as we learnt about the financial cliff edge facing many services and organisations delivering critical support into Scotland’s communities. Certainly this is becoming more acute for organisations who have been particularly reliant on or linked into public sector funding. Helpfully at Foundation Scotland – for the time being at least, we are not seeing a retraction in the generosity of the many individual, family and corporate donors whose funds we distribute.

We of course understand the contradiction that much of the funding we distribute is provided by those better served by the current economic system and its many failings – but we also recognise that the independent funding our donors provide plays a critical role in the sector, is freely and often discreetly but passionately given, and can be far less constrained by the rules and regulations of statutory funding.

So my takeaways were primarily linked to our role as a funder and how we can continue to do better to support the needs and ambitions of the community organisations, communities and donors we serve as times get ever tougher.

Across many of our funding programmes, national level ones especially, we can expect to see competition for funding becoming more acute. Application levels this year have only been slightly up on last year but we can expect this to look different in 12 months time as the impact of cuts in public sector grants and services particularly cuts deeper into communities. In response we will continue to provide an application process that is proportionate and straightforward and that doesn’t increase the stress and strain applicant organisations are already under. Our grantmaking system is underpinned by our commitment to IVAR’s open and trusting grantmaking principles that advocate for a no-nonsense grantmaking approach and that we continually use as a touch stone to refine and simplify our funding processes.

Alongside efforts to improve the experience of being an applicant we are also working hard to inform and inspire the donors whose funds we steward and who in many cases remain the decision makers of their funds. This includes advocating the benefits of investing in prevention and providing longer term unrestricted awards which the conference also made repeated calls for. It’s encouraging to see some of our donors respond to this even when their own resources are relatively modest such as The Essentia Foundation which has now moved to making multi-year awards.

And whilst we will continue to engage individual donors and philanthropists about where and how their funds could achieve most impact on that spectrum of prevention, we will also continue to influence community benefit funds to operate more flexibly than conventional funding.

The increasing sums coming into communities from community benefit funds linked to renewable energy activity was also periodically referenced at the conference. And whilst some were suggesting those increasing sums are insufficient we will continue to drive up good practice in this space and work with communities to design and deliver funds that are context specific, that promote and harness community strengths and that embrace decision-making processes that are inclusive, accountable and community-led.

As Scotland’s leading administrator of community benefit funds and the only fund administrator operating nationally, we are in a strong position to continue to advocate for communities to be at the heart of evolving practice as communities and donors grapple with the challenge of making community benefit funds more equal and just alongside building community wealth and wellbeing.

The conference certainly provided an opportunity to take stock of the challenging conditions so many voluntary sector organisations are operating under. The caution and trepidation remain however because there are clearly some significant systemic failings that it’s not within the sector’s gift to fix but which is having a brutal impact in communities and across the sector at many levels.

For our part at Foundation Scotland we are certain that through this time of uncertainty we will continue to be a resource and asset for the sector through building enduring relationships with more independent donors, shape and deliver funding that meets need and realises ambition and contribute to policy and practice that informs better outcomes for communities.

This blog is the second in a series of follow on blogs from the SURF Annual Conference. Read the next blog from SURF’s Derek Rankine HERE