Funding Projects
Working together to strengthen Barking & Dagenham
Borough Innovation Fund
The Borough Innovation Fund is an initiative from the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and Clear Channel UK, in partnership with the charity Trees for Cities, and Barking and Dagenham Giving.
The Fund was created to improve and increase green spaces across the borough and give community groups and local people the chance to get involved in the design and creation of new green spaces in their neighbourhood.
The fund was publicly advertised in February 2020 and six groups responded with ideas. They were invited to present their projects and answer questions to a panel of assessors including representatives from Clear Channel, the Council, Trees for Cities, and East London Business Alliance.
Everyone's Business
Everyone’s Business is a pilot project run by ELBA and funded by the Mayor’s Violence Reduction Unit.
The pilot, which will last until March 2021, is looking at the role that local businesses can play in giving support and learning to charities and grassroots organisations that work with young people.
It is being run across four East London boroughs – Barking & Dagenham, Newham, Waltham Forest, and Tower Hamlets. BD Giving is the network development lead for the borough.
Our network currently consists of 10 organisations and members have received training around financial planning, writing bids, and developing a business plan with more planned in the new year.
We hope to expand this network towards the end of the pilot, so please get in touch if you’d like get involved.
Renew Fund
This fund comes from income generated by properties in the borough. Its purpose is to invest in ideas, and the people who generate them, in our community.
Before the pandemic, we were using this fund to test a relational model of funding. Applicants would bring us ideas they wanted to try out and we looked at how we could support them in bringing that vision to life. This involved solving problems together rather than insisting that an idea was fully formed and planned out before giving out funding.
Decision-making power still lay with the trustees but we were testing if we could slowly build a community of funding recipients who could then become part of the decision-making process.
In the wake of the pandemic, we continued to offer this support to ideas that were about tackling community needs caused by the lockdown.
We’ve paused this fund while we evaluate the work that we have done in 2020. We want to make sure that the Renew Fund’s aims are not lost and we will be working with the community to decide the best way to move forward.
Rapid Response Fund
The COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund was a £100,000 fund given to us by Lankelly Chase Foundation following the coronavirus lockdown.
We used a participatory process that involved around 30 people from across the community who designed and shaped the process and a further 15 people who stepped forward as decision-makers for the grants.
You can read more about how we went about this here, and read the stories of some of the people who were involved in the process on our Local Voices page.
We are in the process of evaluating this fund and we are excited to share this with you in early 2021.
