COVID Relief Fund 2021: What did we do?

In this blog Cameron, our Learning & Participation Manager, will take you through the process of our recent COVID Relief Fund – the what and how. Next week you will be able to read about what we’ve learned and what comes next.

Back in March, we released £30,000 in the form of 10 grants to be given to small organisations in the community that had experienced financial difficulties due to the ongoing pandemic. This money came from our Renew Fund, which comes from income generated by local affordable housing owned by Barking & Dagenham Giving.

Currently, the decision to release funding rests solely in the hands of the trustees. They used their experience and knowledge of the borough over the last year to set a rough guideline for this fund – namely the size of each grant, which would hopefully target smaller organisations in the borough.

I wanted to be part of a process that contributed something and that someone in the community would be better off because of my input. It’s rare to be given an opportunity to make decisions like this in deciding community funding, to be able to contribute to the local economy without being involved physically

— Relief Fund Decision-maker

How did we do it?

Geraud and I used this guidance to set the threshold at a pre-pandemic income of less than £75,000. As the board wanted this money to be released quickly, we decided to keep the structure similar to the Rapid Response Fund and incorporate the lessons learned from that project, especially on the decision-making side.

With the RRF, the most common bit of feedback was that the decision-makers didn’t really feel like a group so one of the questions we set out to ask was ‘how can we create a sense of community among decision-makers?’

We settled on testing out two things:

1. Running an induction session with the decision-makers so that they got to meet one another and find out more about what they were being asked to do. We also invited decision-makers from the RRF to speak about their experience – in this way we hoped to cascade knowledge and experience about participation.

2. Using the online tool Consider.It to log decisions – this allows you to put your decision on a sliding scale of -100 to 100, as well as the ability to add a comment explaining your choice and reply to other people’s comments.

Once we’d decided these details, we set up a simple application form. We framed the questions around the losses organisations had endured and how this funding would support them.

At the same time, we used our network to put out a call for decision-makers, who would be paid for their time.

I felt involved and felt a sense of responsibility to the community developing throughout the process – it’s one thing caring about the community, it’s another thing to make decisions that impact on it.

— Relief Fund Decision-maker

It was good for morale.

— Relief Fund Decision-maker

After this, we offered the funding to the ten successful candidates. In the weeks since, I have had a conversation with each of the decision-makers to collect feedback about the process from their perspective.

You will have seen some of the things they said throughout this blog – next time, I will go a bit deeper and set out what we’ve learned from this feedback and what we want to do going forward.