How can funders better support anti-racism in Scotland?

This is written by Lucien Staddon Foster, Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER). It is part of a series of insights from organisations funded through the Sky Anti-Racism Grants.

The Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER) is a strategic anti-racist organisation that has been campaigning for racial justice in Scotland for over two decades.

About CRER

CRER advocates for race equality, human rights and anti-racism and seeks to strengthen the social, economic and political capital of Scotland’s Black/minority ethnic communities by engaging with and influencing local, national and wider policy agendas.

We embrace an evidence- and rights-based approach to our work, as we firmly believe that a good evidence base is the foundation of effective equality work. This means that anti-racist research plays a vital role in our campaigning, advocacy and strategic policy initiatives, as the evidence gathered helps us identify equality issues and provide a baseline from which to design actions and measure progress.

As a Black-led organisation, we also recognise the importance of embedding lived experience and cultural knowledge into our ways of working, especially when producing qualitative research. But to fully embrace a ‘not about us without us’ approach to research, organisations must meaningfully engage with minoritised communities and ensure that their time, knowledge and labour are sufficiently recognised, valued and compensated.

Funding the third sector

Unfortunately, the traditional funding landscape for voluntary- and third-sector work can make it difficult to champion this approach. This is, in part, due to the rigidity of the short-term and project-specific grants favoured by funding bodies, as they can pressure organisations to conform to rushed, top-down ways of working in order to deliver institutionally recognised outcomes to grant-makers.

These short-term and project-specific grants can also neglect the realities of voluntary- and third-sector work. For instance, many charitable organisations and community groups juggle multiple responsibilities, but the nature of these grants disproportionately funnels resources into some of their services over others, often to the detriment of specialist services. Service users’ needs do not conveniently coincide with rigid funding periods and arbitrary grant-spend dates either, meaning that groups are often left uncertain about whether the services they access will continue from one funding period to the next.

Furthermore, as organisations in Scotland are often in competition for the same increasingly limited financial resources, this type of grant-making tends to favour larger organisations with the time and resources to dedicate staff/volunteer time to bid-writing and grant-based fundraising. This leaves small and community-led organisations with the difficult task of finding a balance between delivering their all-important services and competing for financial resources.

Ultimately, grant-makers should recognise that voluntary- and third-sector organisations would likely benefit from long-term and unrestricted core funding that allows them to be flexible and responsive to the needs of their service users and partners. This would see funding bodies deliver sustained support to the overarching mission of organisations rather than focusing resources on isolated projects and year-to-year grants.

But what does this look like in terms of supporting anti-racism work in Scotland?

As a strategic anti-racist organisation, CRER’s strategic policy work typically involves research and evidence-gathering followed by sustained policy advocacy to engage with key stakeholders and influence local, national and wider agendas that impact Black/minority ethnic people.

However, it is often hard to acquire funding for this advocacy work as it does not necessarily provide grant-makers with predictable, public-facing outcomes and the quantified impacts they typically value. Strategic policy initiatives also tend to be long-term commitments which can stretch beyond traditional funding periods, making it harder to get sustained funding for the entire course of a project.

Therefore, when grant-makers provide unrestricted, mission-based funding, CRER can turn one-off research projects into sustained strategic policy campaigns, through which we can work with policymakers to embed anti-racist principles in the design and implementation of their policies.

For example, last year, the Corra Foundation awarded CRER an unrestricted grant from the Sky anti-racism programme to support activities tackling racism, including antisemitism, in Scotland. This funding supported the creation of two publications:

• A first-of-its-kind research report on the nature and extent of racism within Scotland’s night-time economy
• A guide to Tackling Online Hate based on Scotland’s new hate crime legislation

The nature of this grant aided these projects in three distinct ways.

First, the lack of restrictions gave CRER the flexibility to be responsive to ongoing policy and legislative changes without having to wait or bid for additional funding. This meant that the guidance for tackling online hate speech and hate crime could be updated alongside Scotland’s changing hate crime policy and deviate from the original pitch where needed.

Second, this flexibility allowed CRER to trial new research methodologies that would not have necessarily guaranteed the grant’s desired outcomes. As a result, CRER produced – for the first time in Scotland – robust and lived experience-guided research into Black/minority ethnic people’s experience of nightlife culture, highlighting systemic issues in the night-time economy.

Third, by being ring-fenced for work relating to tackling racism, the grant allowed CRER to produce this harder-to-pitch research that had previously struggled to gain funding from mainstream mechanisms due to a lack of existing evidence and the project’s more experimental research methods.

In the end, these projects helped illuminate significant yet under-researched areas of racial discrimination in Scotland and provided foundations from which CRER can engage with key stakeholders to influence local and national policy in line with our mission as a strategic anti-racist organisation.

Thoughts for funders seeking to support and meaninfully engage with anti-racism in Scotland

Going forward, funders seeking to support and meaningfully engage with anti-racism work in Scotland should critically reflect on how their funding mechanisms might impact the voluntary- and third-sector organisations at the heart of this work. Do their funding mechanisms favour larger organisations over community-led groups? Do they allow grant-holders to be flexible to the needs of their service users and encourage bottom-up ways of working?

Grant-makers must be willing to relinquish power and more consistently use their position to support organisations instead of dictating what their work looks like through rigid grant-spend regulations and top-down oversight. Beyond this, they should strive to support the overarching mission of anti-racist organisations rather than focusing on isolated reportable outcomes that neglect the nuance and flexibility required in anti-racist campaigning and strategic policy work.

If funders embrace these principles, they can more effectively support those promoting anti-racism at community and policy levels. In practice, this type of support can help organisations like CRER expand projects from one-off research efforts to sustained strategic policy initiatives and programmes for change, allowing for a deeper and longer-term impact on racial equality in Scotland.

Ultimately, we all have a duty to challenge racism in our society, and funders must recognise and act on their unique role in supporting the fight for racial justice.