Institute For Voluntary Action Research

🆕 report: Supporting the progression of all young people The One Southwark programme managed by United St Saviour's Charity, seeks to address the effects of disparity on young people in Southwark through two parallel routes: 🔹 Supporting the progression and wellbeing of young people aged 16 to 25 (those selected to be on the programme) through individualised and holistic support over two years. 🔹 Championing and influencing changes across Southwark by affecting the behaviours and practices of community stakeholders (businesses, charities, funders, statutory agencies, residents), which remove barriers and strengthen opportunities for young people. Supporting young people to be leading contributors to these conversations. IVAR has worked alongside One Southwark as a learning partner between July 2022 and July 2024 to help capture One Southwark members’ journeys and the programme’s progress towards its ambitions. The insights shared in this report are based on research carried out over the two years with the One Southwark team, programme participants and Southwark stakeholders providing the training, support and programme governance (Asset Network and Coalition members). Read the report here https://buff.ly/4fpOvwX With thanks to Merchant Taylors' Foundation for their support. Merchant Taylors' Company Giles Hutchinson

New blog: Have we found the key to sharing power with communities? We know that communities have an important role to play in decision making. But how can we support people to lead change and shape the national agenda? Over the past few years, Local Trust's Community Leadership Academy has supported residents to lead change in their local areas. We were pleased to work with Just Ideas Sustainable Solutions Ltd. on exploring what could be learned from their approach – and Emily Dyson, our Deputy Director, shares how the insights surfaced resonate with what we’re seeing and hearing more widely. Read the blog to find out more: https://lnkd.in/eXtdfKxP

🆕 briefing: 'Batten down the hatches' Our Leading in Uncertainty briefings aim to support charities to navigate prolonged uncertainty and the latest in this series draws on sessions with 22 charity leaders during June and July ahead of the General Election and change in government. Pressure is continuing to be felt across the sector with charity leaders grappling with prolonged instability and rising need, in particular: 🔸Navigating despair 🔸Relentless financial pressure 🔸Volatile political climate 🔸Long lasting impact of Covid 🔸Shifting funder priorities 🔸Onerous grant-making practices Do any of these resonate with you? Read the full report here https://lnkd.in/eT4GiHcr

Such a lovely evening at the launch event for UKGrantmaking.org yesterday - the wonderful Tania Cohen MBE Tracey Gyateng and team at 360Giving have created a funding data playground for us all to run around in. ⬇⬇⬇

Would you like facilitation support for a cross-sector partnership to involve communities in addressing a local health inequality? ☎ Get in touch asap to explore whether our Connecting Health Communities initiative could be a good fit - we're inviting expressions of interest by next Friday 19th July. ⬇ ⬇ ⬇ https://lnkd.in/e2vqvpKb #Communities #Leadership #CrossSector #SystemsChange #NHS #LocalGovernment #VoluntarySector #HealthInequality #Facilitation

Important call for urgent and decisive action, Michael - particularly powerful on this of all days. And strong echoes of what we heard in our previous round of Leading in Uncertainty sessions:

Far from ignoring accountability, as some sceptics argue, people's direct (rather than armchair) experience of trust-based philanthropy is that it enhances accountability - but in a different direction: to funded organisations' missions and the communities and causes they serve.

This is a good read. You mention our Funding Experience Survey, where charities also told us why Open and Trusting Grant-making matters to them: • Be more responsive to their beneficiaries’ priorities: ‘It enables us to develop and deliver services with and for our beneficiaries that are the most responsive they can be’. • Be more agile in the light of changing needs: ‘It gives us flexibility to react to need which makes us more agile and effective as a charity and less stressed as individuals’. • Focus more energy on mission and outcomes: ‘It reduces wasted time, effort and stress and enables us to concentrate more of our limited resources on delivering our charitable objects’; ‘It frees us up to focus more energy on delivery of our mission and outcomes for those we serve’. • Learn and share openly: ‘It enables us to develop a trust-based and authentic relationship with a funder, shifting the power balance and giving us confidence to be honest about what is working, what isn't and what we’ve learnt from that’. • Plan more effectively: ‘It allows us to plan for the future … be more strategic and innovative and build a stronger organisation’; ‘It enables the organisation to use our expertise to achieve social impact, plan ahead, and evaluate honestly; and it builds confidence of staff and volunteers’. This echoes the excellent work of our friends Trust-Based Philanthropy Project on The Impact of Trust-Based Philanthropy:

Respect and appreciation to Elaine and her colleagues at William Grant Foundation for making their thinking visible about what it takes to go further along the Open and Trusting journey, and why it matters. As Elaine says: "the improvement journey is not one with an end".

Charities continue to tell us that ‘Unrestricted funding – money that we can spend on anything within our charitable objects – would make a huge difference to our ability to respond to changing circumstances and the things that matter most to our community/cause’.  At the same time, we hear that funders struggle to make the shift from restricted grants because of concerns about ‘impact’. The examples of funder practice in our new report address these concerns head on – most significantly by championing impact as a collective achievement: ‘Using a trust-based learning approach helps charities and funders engage as equal partners in building collective wisdom around impact to advance equitable and effective social change. It privileges neither the power of money over the lived experience and expertise of communities and practitioners, nor the appeal of ‘hard metrics’ over diversity of data.’