Making funding fairer
By Julie Aitken
This Challenge Poverty Week we’re sharing insights on action Corra has taken towards fairer funding and creating a Scotland where no one goes hungry. This blog explores how funders can review their practices to increase their impact. It focusses on our own review into delivering micro grants for small community-led groups.
At Corra, we regularly think about how we can make our funding practices accessible and straightforward for groups applying for funding. Throughout 2021-2023, we reviewed our approach to making micro grants. As a result, we made 6 big changes to our micro grant making approach. These changes made our grant making more flexible, trusting, and responsive to what small community groups need.
- We introduced rolling open programmes with no fixed closing date. We also made funding decisions within 20 working days.
- We shortened small grants application forms to 2 pages.
- We pro-actively reached out to groups that we haven’t reached before.
- We expanded criteria to reflect Scotland’s voluntary sector. This included inviting applications from non-constituted and voluntary groups.
- We introduced alternative payment options for groups who don’t have bank accounts.
- We designed programmes to achieve a high success rate.
What is a micro grant?
A micro grant is £500-£3000. Whilst we define this size of grant as micro, many groups in receipt of these grants tell us it is significant.
“This was the first substantial funding we received. It made a huge difference.”
What proved difficult to change?
These changes took time to deliver, involved staff across Corra working together to find solutions, and introduced several new processes.
Payments to groups (often non-constituted who don’t have bank accounts)
Grant holders told us that our ‘buddy payment system’ where a third party constituted group would receive and hold funds on behalf of the non-constituted group didn’t always work. They felt that this didn’t place trust in themselves to manage and deliver the work.
Corra spent six months researching alternative payment solutions. We spoke with applicants and explored offering grants on either pre-paid cards or of using Social Change Nest and fiscal hosting.
We now offer non-constituted groups the options of using the existing ‘buddy system’ or of using Social Change Nest. Corra covers the costs associated with using Social Change Nest. This is still a work in progress, and we recognise the process needs to be quicker and easier for groups who decide to receive their grant in this way.
What is fiscal hosting?
Fiscal hosting is where a legally registered organisation (the fiscal host) holds money on behalf of a community group, social movement or project that doesn’t want to register legal entity.
In the system Corra uses, Social Change Nest hold the funds and each group has a public page that shows the funding they’ve received and what they’ve done. Groups send in receipts or invoices to their page and Social Change Nest pay these within a few working days. Once a group has a page, they can also receive donations and fundraise using this page too.
“Love that groups don’t need to be constituted. Was a great help.”
Understanding our data and capturing what we’re missing
We introduced new coding on our grant management database to better understand the groups we were and weren’t funding.
Coding is the word we use to describe specific attributes or characteristics of groups applying to us – it includes things like the income level of an organisation, whether that organisation is led by lived experience, or where an organisation works. A cross Corra group of staff identified gaps in our data and introduced new processes to capture this.
It took time for new processes on our grant management system to be introduced and for staff to be fully trained on these.
What has changed?
We are starting to see the effects of these changes in who and what we are funding. On these small grants programmes, 68% of groups with an income of under £10,000 were applying to Corra for the first time. We are also seeing the new processes introduced being used across other grant programmes and areas of Corra’s work. Grant holders are enthusiastic about these changes and tell us they feel more supported and less judged.
“This initial small grant gave us the capacity to achieve greater things.”
Reflections for funders looking to make their funding fairer
- Ask those you are seeking to fund how you can make your funding practices better.
- Set aside real time to explore your current practices and understand where things don’t work as you’d like.
- Take the risk in a new process, method, or whatever it is you are seeking to change.
- Speak to other funders and learn from their experiences. We do a lot of this at Corra and are always happy to arrange a time for a cuppa and a chat.