Place-based funding

In June 2017, Tudor was one of many funders involved in the response to the Grenfell Tower fire. Based just 15 minutes’ walk from Grenfell Tower, Tudor was well placed to facilitate the delivery of the London Funders Community Core Costs Fund to 100 community organisations. Grant managers from seven different funders were involved in outreach and collective decision-making, distributing £1.1million to help meet the immediate costs of responding to the emergency.

The response presented funders with a challenge: to get funding quickly to small, front-line organisations. We had to balance due diligence against speed of response. Operating outside our comfort zone, we had to act quickly and instinctively. We learned a lot.

Face-to-face engagement, listening and co-creating applications were vital elements of the fund. The process allowed us to be alongside the organisations, giving space for applicants to talk about their experience while also supporting them to think about their needs and to ‘frame’ an application quickly and easily.

IVAR’s 2018 report, The possible, not the perfect challenged funders to consider how to bring greater urgency, responsible lightness of touch and more open relationships into our everyday work.

In response, we asked ourselves how we could replicate aspects of this ‘on the ground’, quick, face-to-face approach to making small grants in a non-emergency situation. How would it feel to shorten our lead time for a grant, and work with community groups to create an application together through a conversation? Might this be a better way of engaging with the people and communities we want to work with?

We thought carefully about how this approach could be of benefit, and do no harm to the people, organisations and communities we wanted to work with. In the first half of 2019, we worked with organisations in the Tees Valley area to get to know Hartlepool, and to identify groups which might benefit from a small grant. In June 2019, Tudor staff and trustees spent three days in Hartlepool, with an afternoon dedicated to meeting local groups. A trustee and a member of staff listened, and during a half-hour conversation, with 20 groups, together drew up a funding request. In the few hours after the conversations, trustees and staff came together, reflected on the conversations, and approved grants of up to £5,000 for each group.

Read about some of the thoughts of the community organisations involved in the conversations, as well as Tudor’s own reflections on the importance of trust, how they can keep learning from the people we met in Hartlepool, and what they might do next.