
But why would we want someone sitting in a swanky high-rise office in central London deciding where this money goes. It’s not their money and it's not even BD Giving’s, it's for the residents of Barking & Dagenham...
Jack Webb
A realisation about what ‘community-led’ means

The quadrilateral is used next, helping to score these investment proposals against risk, liquidity, return, and impact.

While we have an outline of what happens next, it is an iterative process and we are ready to embrace that! In fact, we already have. We are in a very privileged position in that we get to shape this process from the very beginning, leaving a framework for others to use; more importantly, for others to build upon, to improve, and to push it even further to its limits.
Why make this harder for ourselves?
Yes, we could have got a fund manager to manage our portfolio (terms I have only recently learnt!) – that would have been the easy option. But why would we want someone sitting in a swanky high-rise office in central London deciding where this money goes. It’s not their money and it’s not even BD Giving’s, it’s for the residents of Barking & Dagenham.
That’s what we are setting out to do; to shift power in the borough to those who will be affected by the decisions that are made.
Basically to tie this all together – I am very excited for what’s to come, both for the borough and for BD Giving.
If you had told me a year ago I would be working on something as big as this, I would not have believed you. For me, it feels as though we are defining what community-led investment can look like for the U.K. We’re moulding something great and I can’t wait for us to show the world!
But what is ‘community’?
For the analytical types, one could now question how we define ‘community’. In one of our recent workshops with partners, Curiosity Society, Andy Schofield, the company’s director, observed rather interestingly that we must now think wider and deeper about what ‘community’ means.
This has led us to start succinctly unpicking this further and what ‘community’ means to BD Giving, in its granular detail. Andy’s comment resonated with me as it got me thinking about how nebulous the term really is. We want to unravel the nuances of the language, especially within the context of community-led investment, and answer some key assumptions.
Let’s ‘literally’ pick this apart – who defines community? What is community?
Wait, wait…this now goes beyond the scope of my note here, and is really showing the organised mess of my brain right now!
Maybe it’s something to talk about in my next blog post?
See you there!