Black Food Fund: Story so far…
Hi, we’re Hello Brave and Shift. We’re in the process of setting up and supporting a new experimental community-led funding committee. It’s called the Black Food Fund. This is a (now) four-part blog series about the start of this 2-year journey. This, our second to last blog in this series, sharing our experience of getting up and running. We’ll be back with a new blog series about how the Black Food Fund is going so far.
Blog Three: Getting Started
It’s been a few months since we wrote this blog on origins and on doing this work from a funder perspective.
This was shaping up to be a long one. So this blog will be a rundown of our three main highlights. The last blog in the series will be on some big challenges and lessons learned.
Our Highlights.
Working with the recruitment group
As part of setting up the Black Food Fund committee, we worked with an amazing recruitment group. Melek, Marie, Sabrina and Will. Each with a connection with and commitment to Lambeth and Southwark and the food space.
The recruitment group’s first role was to finalise and run the recruitment process. This involved:
- designing an expression of interest
- finalising scripts for conversations with each applicant
- refining recruitment criteria to support the selection process
As part of this work, they also helped to design and run a beautiful collective recruitment day. This somehow managed to feel less like a hideous assessment centre and more like an intimate love-in. A moment between community members passionate about social justice, equity and change.
Some feedback from that collective recruitment day…
“Meeting shared minds”
“Collaborative friendly transparent and built a sense of community”
“…made it feel non-competitive and safe within the space amongst other inspiring individuals”
“Everyone willingly shared experiences and showed a commonality of purpose to change the status quo”
The idea was for applicants to meet each other. To explore what it might feel like to work together as part of the committee.
The recruitment group designed the session. Bella and Tayo facilitated it. In the end 8 of the 10 participants attended (2 couldn’t make it). 3 members of the recruitment group also joined (1 could not).
It was the first time a recruitment process had brought us happy tears. There was such a deep bond built, so much transparency, and very little (if any) showboating. We witnessed some amazing, thoughtful and dynamic collaboration in the space.
We’d worried A LOT that the two candidates who couldn’t make it would be penalised but in the end the committee selected one of those candidates to join the committee. So, although not ideal, I think we got away with it.
We also (think) this early relationship-building moment helped the final committee get off to a strong start. Some ingredients we think particularly worked:
- Reinforcing that everyone here would be perfect for the committee
- Framing the day around collaboration and collective decision-making
- Time invested in relational checking-in and warm-up using the School of Life Cards
- Doing real work that would be useful for the final committee. No “case studies”
- Honesty about the format as an experiment
- Paying people who attended but did not go on to join the committee
You can check out the session plan here.
Welcoming the committee
While we can say with hand on heart that every single person who was shortlisted would have been amazing on the committee, the recruitment team had the unenviable job of selecting the final six. In the end, for a blend of experience, expertise and chemistry, they chose Akwasi, Candice, Celestine, Gay Kemi and Veronica.
We welcomed the new committee to the Black Food Fund. This involved a series of onboarding sessions that started in November. We’d planned to onboard the committee in five sessions over weeks.
That was meant to include:
- a kick-off where we agreed on principles and vision for the fund
- a session on power and how we do and don’t want to gro and use it
- a session to explore contracts (and the grant agreement)
- a session on the grant-making process and
- a final session to agree on jobs to be done and reflect.
SMH. In the end, the speed with which we had expected to do this proved to be incredibly over-ambitious. We’ll talk more about how hard that didn’t work (and why) in the last blog. For now we’ll just share that the result is that we’re still really in the onboarding/set-up phase as this blog goes live. Onboarding session number 13 at our last count. 😂 😅
This has, of course, had material implications on budget and timeline. With some continued discussion and negotiation with Impact on Urban Health, however, we’ve been able to continue to adjust. To find a plan that feels realistic for everyone involved.
Getting Contractual.
In this time we’ve also been wading deep in contracts and grant agreements. We tend to shy away from making things feel contractual and transactional. “Let’s look at what the contract says…” are words that bring most consultants dread.
In this work however, we knew that it was vital that we nail the agreement between Impact on Urban Health and Shift. And the agreement between the committee, Shift, Impact on Urban Health and Hello Brave.
Power lies in these foundational documents and it felt important to start as we meant to go on. This was about leaving enough freedom from funder expectations and passing down only the necessary risks. We wanted this to leave the committee clear on what is legally required and free to do their work.
Baked into all of this was the desire for this committee to be independent from Impact on Urban Health (but also from Shift and Hello Brave).
We haven’t got enough space in this blog series to go into any real depth about all that it’s taken (taking) to do that work. Or to share all that we’ve learned. This is already SO LONG. But the broad process has involved:
- Five drafts of the collective contract
- Working with two sets of lawyers Bird and Bird and StoneKing
- Almost £5k worth of previously uncosted legal fees
- Experimenting with a visual version of the draft contract
- Four or so sessions to discuss the collective contract
- A collective contract that’s still not done and is (sadly) still about 15 pages long
If you want to have a chat with us, we’d be happy to talk through our approach and the things we’ve learned along the way. You can take a look at how the drafts of our collective contract have evolved from this to this (we’re still working on final drafts). You can also look at our experimental ‘visual contract’ here.
And that’s it for now. In our next blog we’ll share one of the meatier and more painful challenges we experienced in the process. It’ll be focused on the implication it had on grantees who’d been involved in the earliest stages of this journey.
For now, however, thanks for reading. Please do get in touch if there’s anything we’ve shared or talked about that you’d like to discuss.
This work has been funded by Impact on Urban Health, hosted by Shift and facilitated by Hello Brave.
