New Community Action Fund powered by Campaign Bootcamp legacy resources

We are excited to announce that later this year the Civic Power Fund will launch a Community Action Fund.

This Fund is for UK-based grassroots campaigning and organising work and comes from Campaign Bootcamp legacy funds. You can read more about this legacy funding here.

The Community Action Fund will provide flexible support to grassroots organisations that are building the power of their community and campaigning for change. Grants will be awarded on a sliding scale between £2,500 and £20,000.

Who is this fund for?

The Community Action Fund will prioritise organisations:

• led by people with lived experience of injustice
• led by people excluded from democracy and from accessing traditional modes of support because of who they are or where they are from.

The guiding principles of the Community Action Fund are set out below. These are rooted in the shared aims and values of the Civic Power Fund and Campaign Bootcamp. They are shaped by extensive conversations with organisers and campaigners. We are also grateful to the many other funders and organisations publicly sharing lessons and good practice in this space. [1]

The Community Action Fund will open to organisations that are:

• Rooted in and accountable to their community.
• Hoping to achieve long-term change on issues affecting the lives of their community.
• Working towards this long-term change by building the power of their community.
• Lacking the resources to take their vision to the next level.
• Seeking to build a larger us and resisting the politics of division.

We are recruiting a Community Action Fund Manager and a Community Action Fund Panel, made up of grassroots organisers and campaigners. They will play a key role in further designing and developing the Fund and the selection process.

We know that not all organisations doing this work use the language of power and organising, so we will provide hands-on support throughout the process to make it as accessible as possible.

Grants will be awarded in line with Trust Based Philanthropy principles. This means they will prioritise flexibility in funding and ensure minimal application process burdens. All successful applicants will be offered support beyond funding. This will include the Civic Power Fund Governance Hub and optional and bespoke cohort and capacity building.

We passionately believe that communities impacted by injustice should have the power and resources to end it. The Community Action Fund aims to build on the work of Campaign Bootcamp by converting this ethos into tangible resources for communities on the frontline.

Currently, far too little money is reaching these communities. The mission of the Civic Power Fund is to change this.

By building a pooled fund for community organising, we hope to unleash the power of people to improve their lives and their communities and dismantle the barriers to racial, economic, gender, disability, migration, climate and LGBTQ+ justice.

If you have any questions please get in touch with contact@civicpower.org.uk and look out for more information later in the year.

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About the Civic Power Fund

The Civic Power Fund is the UK’s first pooled donor fund for community organising. By investing in grassroots community organising, we aim to strengthen democracy and help communities win change that matters to them.

We aim to achieve this through:

1. Building power in place. Because organising in place builds community bonds and is at the heart of building and exercising civic power.
2. Building organising infrastructure. Community organisers know what infrastructure they need to nurture civic power and build the next generation of organisers. This is why we will provide flexible, long-term funding to grassroots community organisers across the country. We are working with five pilot grantee partners and will initiate another round of grants in the Autumn, alongside opening the Community Action Fund.
3. Speaking up about the importance of people-powered strategies. Community organising is one of the best and one of the most under-resourced mechanisms we have to shift power to and secure justice. We are demonstrating this through research and analysis. We are also bringing organisers, strategists, and funders together to understand how funding can best achieve this.

We are a relational funder, who aims to get to know organisations as well as possible, saving their time during the application process.

About Campaign Bootcamp

Campaign Bootcamp was formed in 2013 with an aim to build a world where people impacted by injustice would have the tools and skills they need to end it. Over eight years, they sought a fundamental shift in who campaigns, how they do it and the impact they have in the short and the long term.

In 2021, Campaign Bootcamp decided to close. They feared that the values at the centre of their training were not experienced by staff. The following excerpt from the Campaign Bootcamp Trustee’s explains their rationale:

“With no sustainable path forward, we felt it was only right to close the organisation in the kindest way possible, redistribute our remaining funds to organisations better equipped to do this work with equity and justice at the centre, and clear space for new entities to grow that don’t repeat our mistakes.”

In July 2022, Campaign Bootcamp published a legacy report, capturing key lessons from their closure. We are grateful to the Trustees, Staff, and Alumni who shared their insights so that others can learn and grow stronger.

Key Definitions

• Democracy. Democracy means citizens working together to identify problems, co-design solutions, and win change. It rests on people having the power to hold their elected representatives to account beyond participating in elections.
• Social Justice. The five commonly understood principles of social justice are 1) work grounded in human rights; work focussed on 2) the fair distribution of resources and 3) opportunities; 4) ensuring all groups have equal capacity to participate in democracy; and 5) action to prevent discrimination based on age, class, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity and disibility.
• Lived experience. First hand experience — past or present — of injustice.

[1] [1] Thanks especially to JRCT for their open source thinking on the Grassroots Movements Fund; Blagrave Trust for the inspiration provided by their Challenge and Change Fund; the Rosa Fund, for the clarity of approach in their Stand with Us Fund; and Edge Fund, Camden Giving, and Footwork for their innovative, local, participatory approach.