This article was originally published by Local Trust.
For the last 15 years, Big Local has tested a simple but radical proposition: what happens when local people are trusted with the money, time and power to make decisions about their own neighbourhoods?
Across 150 communities, we have seen what that can make possible. We have also learned that genuinely resident-led change is rarely simple. It requires patience, relationships, confidence, support – and institutions willing to work differently.
As Local Trust approaches closure, the question for us is no longer simply convincing others why this approach is important, but unpicking our learning so those other institutions know how. So, what happens when other funders try putting a resident-led approach to decision making into practice?
That is what a new pilot programme with IVAR and Yorkshire Funders will explore.
From making the case to testing the practice
There has been a significant shift in the funding sector over the lifetime of Big Local. Ideas about participation, trust and sharing power have moved much closer to the mainstream. But there is a difference between believing that residents should have more power and handing it over.
Our previous research with IVAR found that, while resident-led decision-making is widely valued, relatively few funders have gone as far as giving communities meaningful control over funding decisions.
There are reasons: funders have trustees and strategies to answer to, and questions about risk, accountability and representation. And working at a genuinely hyper-local level requires relationships and knowledge that cannot be created overnight.
So rather than produce another set of recommendations about what funders should do, we wanted to create an opportunity to try it.
Over the next two years, a group of seven funders will work in neighbourhoods across Yorkshire and the Humber to test and embed resident decision-making within their grant-making practices.
The participating funders bring different starting points, experience and comfort levels with resident decision-making and represent a range of organisational models including corporate, family and community foundations. Their approaches will undoubtedly differ too, drawing from a range of methods, from participatory grant-making and resident panels, to working through deeply rooted local organisations, community organising and participatory budgeting.
We wholeheartedly support this variation.
There is no Big Local blueprint
One of the temptations at the end of a 15-year programme is to turn what we have learned into a blueprint: follow these steps and community power will result. Big Local tells us almost the opposite.
Places are different. Relationships are different. Power operates differently. What matters is not reproducing a particular committee structure or grant-making process, but holding onto some fundamental principles: start with the strengths of a place, invest in people and relationships, build confidence, and give residents genuine rather than symbolic power.
So this pilot will not prescribe a single model.
Instead, IVAR will bring participating funders together as a Community of Practice, creating space to compare approaches, confront difficulties and adapt as they go. Yorkshire Funders brings its membership and its regional relationships and knowledge, while Local Trust shares what 15 years of Big Local can tell us about the realities of resident-led decision-making.
Importantly, the aim is not to create resident panels that simply endorse decisions already made elsewhere. Funders will establish their broad strategic parameters, but within them the ambition is to explore what it really means to hand over the pen.
That is where this gets interesting.
What will funders have to change?
It’s still early days, but some of the questions emerging from participating funders already get to the heart of how funding institutions work – and were active considerations throughout Big Local.
- How do you recruit residents inclusively, rather than simply reaching the people already most confident in formal spaces?
- How do you talk about money – and give people confidence to make decisions about it – without recreating the very power dynamics you are trying to change?
- What skills do funders need to facilitate decision-making without directing?
- And what happens if residents make a decision that the funder would not have?
These are not questions with neat answers. The value of this pilot will be in seeing how different funders navigate them with real money and real consequences, being open about where things feel difficult and where things work well.
That is why the appetite to participate has been so encouraging. Interest from funders in Yorkshire and the Humber exceeded our expectations. What seemed particularly valuable to participants was not the promise of a ready-made model, but the opportunity to experiment alongside peers: to try something, learn from it and adjust.
From individual experiments to a different funding system?
Big Local benefited from unusual conditions: £150 million, 15 years, and a substantial budget for capacity-building support. Most funders do not operate in those circumstances.
If resident-led decision-making is going to move further into mainstream funding practice, it has to work in the messier reality of existing trusts and foundations: alongside strategies, governance arrangements, funding cycles, trustee expectations and different appetites for risk.
That makes this pilot both more constrained than Big Local and, potentially, more significant.
The question is not whether another Big Local can be created, but whether some of the principles Big Local demonstrated can become part of the ordinary business of funding. What needs to change inside funding organisations for that to happen? Where are the genuine red lines – and which turn out to be perceived barriers like culture and comfort, rather than necessities?
And, crucially, after a funder has experienced sharing power with residents, does it ever go completely back to the way it worked before? We don’t know yet.
Over the next two years, IVAR and Yorkshire Funders will capture what happens as participating funders design their approaches, award grants, reflect and adapt. That learning will be shared with the wider funding sector, including through IVAR’s Open and Trusting funder community.
Local Trust will close long before we see the answers.
But perhaps that is an appropriate final experiment for an organisation created around the idea of trust and handing over power.
Article by Meg Falck, head of programme at Local Trust