Locality Convention 2016: Charities under £1m and social investment
Slides on the findings of our recent study on charities and social investment presented at the Locality Convention 2016.Head, Heart & Hands Make Collaboration Work
This short conference paper covers ten top tips for partnership building and lessons learned through CollaborationNICollaboration NI: Lessons from the evaluation
The characteristics of responsible funding
In October 2015, Ben Cairns spoke at a conference for Scottish funders, sharing IVAR’s learning from over 40 research and evaluation projects for, with and about UK trusts and foundations. The focus of much of this work has been small to medium (£100k to £1m income p.a.) social welfare voluntary and community organisations – organisations working to relieve poverty and disadvantage, tackle injustice, and work for social change. As IVAR marks its fifteenth birthday, we have begun to draw together disparate findings and observations into a commentary about the role and contribution of charitable funder.
UK Evaluation Roundtable 2014
In March 2014, 32 staff from 22 trusts and foundations came together for the inaugural gathering of the UK Evaluation Roundtable. Established by IVAR in partnership with the Center for Evaluation Innovation, the Roundtable aims to help trusts and foundations explore the relationship between evaluation and strategy. This paper outlines findings from our background research on evaluation practices in the 22 UK trusts and foundations participating in the Roundtable.Inaugural UK Evaluation Roundtable
In March 2014, 32 staff from 22 trusts and foundations came together for the inaugural gathering of the UK Evaluation Roundtable. Established by IVAR in partnership with the Center for Evaluation Innovation, the Roundtable aims to help trusts and foundations explore the relationship between evaluation and strategy. The March 2014 convening centred on a teaching case of Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s Learning Away programme. This report outlines discussions held at the event, covering: the purpose of evaluation; enduring challenges; and action needed to introduce and use evaluation for strategic learning.New ways of giving by UK Trusts and Foundations
This paper was presented at the 2012 International Society for Third-Sector Research (ISTR) Conference in Siena, Italy.
In the paper we draw on research with 30 UK trusts and foundations in order to shed light on ‘high engagement funding’ (a cluster term to describe the phenomenon of trusts and foundations providing both funding and additional support to grantees) practices; we do this by looking at why and how such approaches are used and by considering the implications, challenges and benefits of these practices from the perspective of both foundations and their grantees.
We argue that ‘high engagement funding’ might be a more useful concept for debating the relative advantages and disadvantages of ‘more than just money’ relationships. We identify four key features of ‘high engagement funding’:
- interest in the whole grantee organisation;
- willingness to fund core costs;
- a partnership approach – on both sides – to the grantee/funder relationship;
- and additional support from the funder (which acts either directly on the grantee organisation or indirectly on the environment in which it operates).