Challenge Poverty Week 2025: Better Investment In Communities

Better Investment In Communities 

Challenge Poverty Week 2025

There’s never been a more important time to invest in communities. Communities can hold and heal us, they can build and renew, they can weave bonds and bridges between us. And they can challenge poverty.  

At the heart of better investment in communities is fair funding for the third sector organisations. And there’s a very clear and powerful agenda for improvement in third sector funding, from SCVO’s Fair Funding campaign, to IVAR’s Open and Trusting grantmaking commitments and their call to Get the basics right.  

Corra has a part to play in bringing about fair funding for third sector organisations, and better investment in communities. We are doing this by: 

• Making our grant funds as fit for purpose as we can 

• Increasing funding for groups who have been less well funded in the past; and  

• Using insights to create wider change and better investment. 

Fit for purpose  

Every third sector organisation – Corra included – puts long term unrestricted funding at the top of the wish list.  

It’s the most practical, implementable and impactful thing funders can offer, and the truth is there needs to be more of it in the funding landscape. It’s vital that funders try to tip the balance from funding mostly being short term and restricted to it mostly being long term and unrestricted.  

It isn’t always easy to do but Corra is prioritising this, including – where we can – in the work we deliver on behalf of others. The benefits are clear: stability, quality, innovation, and wellbeing in funded organisations.  

We want each of our funds to be accessible and provide the right type of support to organisations delivering vital work. This means being proportionate, flexible, open, consistent and reliable. We use the Open and Trusting commitments as a compass for this and report on them every year, asking applicants and grant holders to tell us how well we’re doing through an annual survey.  

We’ve also made practical changes to the way we fund: sharing success rates and contact details on the website, publishing data and lists of grants made, making sure it’s clear who decides on applications and how, providing eligibility checkers and making sure forms are as short as possible. Funders love forms… but my current favourite is the Boost Fund, which has only four main questions to answer.  

Increasing funding 

Better investment in communities also means taking a strong look at how resourced groups and communities are and tackling inequalities within the funding system itself. 

For Corra this has meant doing better to make sure funding is there for groups we haven’t reached in the past. Designing funding programmes with those groups at the heart. And making sure Corra is where they are. 

Funding ‘led-by and for’ organisations through our Henry Duncan grants has been vital. Alongside more participatory approaches to grantmaking, this works to consider the equity of resourcing and put more in the hands of people with lived experience. 

Our anti-racism action plan has been a big part of this, and through ring-fencing we have proudly made grants of more than £1m to organisations from black and racially minoritised communities in the last four years. This work is about resourcing; reaching and being reachable; recognising and growing power within communities.  

We also know money isn’t always the answer, or at least, not the whole answer. Through working alongside specific place-based communities across the central belt we’ve learned about backing local leaders and ideas, uncovering assets and talents, and strengthening relationships and connections. Better investment can also be about trust and time. 

Creating wider change 

Corra helping bring about fair funding for the third sector and better investment for communities includes recognising that we have power and influence beyond our own programmes, noticing when we are in places where decisions are made, and using our voice well. 

The bedrock of this is the learning from the work we fund and support in communities. These insights – from reports, events, conversations and calls – inform everything. In many ways, we feel it’s our responsibility to use our capacity to analyse, understand and share these messages.  

We hold the wins close. The government programme that evolved to become multi-year funding thanks to sharing the knowledge from grant holders about how to achieve the greatest and most sustainable change. The patient work to build a funder collaboration that creates a potential single door to several funders for groups that could do with having less forms to fill in. 

We champion practice and policy change that helps third sector organisations do their best work by funding them fairly, and helps communities thrive by investing in them well.  

In Scotland, there’s a good bit of that around. And plenty more work to do.