Annual Report and Accounts 2022-2023

Corra’s ten-year strategy is a response to the world we live in, and to the one we want to play a part in building. We want to hold ourselves accountable for the work we do, and the progress we make. We are pleased to share our Annual Accounts and Annual Impact Summary covering our work from April 2022 to March 2023. We also publish focused reports each year, covering:

Learning and insights from grant-making
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Open and trusting grant-making

As we reflect on the past year, we also look forward. We’ll strive to listen, be alongside people, especially those whose rights are most at risk, and to be bold in the pursuit of change.

Our Grant Making

Grant-making is an important part of Corra’s contribution – increasingly via participatory approaches, ie. via lived experience panels. Corra also manages grants on behalf of others.

This year we delivered cash first funding totalling £2.8m to communities across Scotland to support with essential living costs. We delivered the #Give400.scot campaign to encourage charitable giving by those who could afford it. We distributed £913,000 in ‘top-up’ grants with funding from Henry Duncan, Parntership Drugs Initiative, Comic Relief and National Drugs Mission to support organisations with the cost of living crisis.

Dunterlie Food Share volunteers

Our Place Based work

Our place-based work hopes to support communities to connect with each other and to use their voice and power to influence wider system change. In 2022-23, we connected with over 2100 new people in the communities we work alongside.

We also continued work on Everyone Every Day. We had the privilege of hearing from residents of Kirkaldy and Renfrewshire at our ‘pop up shops’. This will help shape the Everyone, Every Day project, that builds on the Participatory Cities model of large scale community participation. People are offered easier ways to create better local places, use their skills and passions and build connected, resilient places.

Community Story: Cumnock Men’s Shed

Cumnock Men’s Shed have been successful in securing £145,000 to support the initial stages of the renovation work on a permanent workshop space for the group. This work is now underway. Although the original focus was local men, the group realise that many women could also benefit from engaging in activity in this creative space. The Shed will therefore be open to both men and women in Cumnock and the surrounding area. Community togetherness was recently highlighted when participants from several groups helped to tackle the severe foliage surrounding the building… mother nature had certainly started to claim this land back.

Learning and Influencing

We share learning and insights from our work to help make long-term change to systems. We want to amplify the voices of people and communities and help influence who, how, and what is funded in Scotland. Key focuses this year have been:

• Developing independent human rights funding in Scotland.
• Progressing a range of actions around racial equity – led by Corra’s Anti-racism working group. This included distributing targeted funds through Sky and Henry Duncan Grants.
• Progressing action on climate change by becoming an accredited climate literate organisaton and ensuring our investments are managing in a responsible and climate conscious way.