Two years at the Civic Power Fund
This month, the Civic Power Fund turned two.
With so much happening and so many changes across the last year, we wanted to take this opportunity to again step back and reflect.
One major change between 2022 and 2023 is that formally we morphed from being a small company to a large charity.
In reality, we remain a start-up, with a team of 3 full time equivalent (FTE) staff members, which couldn’t feel further from a ‘large charity’.
But in practical terms, this means we’ll soon be publishing a proper Annual Report, with detailed financial information (wish us luck!).
Ahead of this, we also wanted to transparently share as much information as possible.
We hope that you spot three core themes across this update:
First, our unwavering commitment to the groups we serve and our determination to raise the money they need to thrive. Our job is to liberate capital in the pursuit of people power. We’ve seen first hand just how ready grassroots groups are for investment — and just how transformative it could be.
Second, our growing confidence; we increasingly know what we’re doing and as a result have even stronger opinions about what needs to change. As hard as this may be to imagine, you’ll be hearing even more from us this year!
Finally, our ambition to focus on our own infrastructure so we can better serve our communities. We need to strengthen our backend so we can become a robust organisation that our partners can depend on long into the future.
This latter point requires slowing down. We’re not very good at this, so we are asking our team, partners, and trustees to consciously hold us to account.
Civic Power Fund in Numbers
Before digging into our reflections, I wanted to take a moment to share some of the things we’re proudest of.
In the two years since we launched, we have:
- Awarded over £1 million awarded to 35 grantee partners. As our own resources expand, we are growing the number of multi-year grants we award; this is key to building long-term power. Here, you can find out more about all of the amazing organisations we are working with.
- Raised over £4.3 million from 21 separate donors. This includes multi-year grants to 2029 and small, one-off contributions. As we continue to grow, we will continue to stress that these are equally important; it is this plurality of donors that ensures we shift resources at scale, learn together, and stay accountable to our grantee partners first.
- Advised over 20 grassroots groups through the Civic Power Fund Governance Hub. This specialist legal hub is supporting groups with their key governance and strategy challenges. We also built a new partnership with Brevio to provide robust yet non-invasive due-dillegence checks. We’ve supported almost a hundred groups to access these checks so they can use findings to improve their governance and financial controls. Combined with the Governance Hub, this approach means we can work with our partners to strengthen their controls rather than reject them because they don’t meet our standards.
- Ran our first democratic and participatory fund. Over 7000 people expressed an interest in; 900 groups applied to; and 89 groups — from 42 different cities, towns and villages — were shortlisted for the Community Action Fund. Each shortlisted group was supported to co-create a durable Grant Memo. We saw first hand both the incredible grassroots organising work happening across the country and the huge lack of accessible, long-term funding for this work. We captured key lessons throughout. The Fund received 100% positive feedback from rejected second stage applicants and 77% positive feedback from rejected first stage applicants.
- Recruited 7 Community Action Fund Panellists; a team of community organisers who built and delivered a participatory grantmaking process. They awarded grants to 18 different grassroots groups from across the UK. 100% of Panellists gave positive feedback on their experience.
- Where we were not able to fund groups directly, we worked with them to secure alternative sources of income. As part of this, we have convinced several key funding partners to accept Civic Power Fund grant memos in lieu of applications. At least 8 additional partners have been funded through this route.
- Launched a new Alliance for Youth Organising with Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and The Blagrave Trust. This independent, intergenerational Alliance will make collective, long-term decisions to boost youth organising infrastructure across the UK. In January 2024, we received 170 *incredible* applicants for this Alliance and appointed the final 9 Alliance members. Watch this space!
- Launched a second landmark study of where UK social justice funding goes. Together with The Hour is Late, we found that just 0.3% of grants from UK social justice funders are going towards community organising and the vast majority of social funding is going service delivery or ‘inside game’work at a national level. Over 200 people attended the launch of Funding Justice 2. We are now working with over 20 funders to help change practice based on lessons from the report and our early grantmaking.
- 17 Big Charities were involved in PowerUp: Organising in Big Charities, a new project to help large charities interested in organising to ‘get it right’. Over 20 large charities went on to form a new Community of Practice to influence and inform their organisations.
- Hosted our first learning exchange, taking 14 community organisers and 5 funders to New York to learn from US organising and grow collective ambition around our UK capacity.
- Built a community of thousands of passionate, committed and willing individuals who generously shared their time, energy and wisdom. This community has welcomed our small team into their networks, helping us meet goals well beyond our size. We are eternally grateful.
What have we learnt from the work?
The stakes could not be higher
We are living through a moment of profound crisis.
For the first time in 25 years, global poverty rates have increased. Across the world, societies are more fractured than ever and democracy is in trouble.
These are global trends, but they are ricocheting through our communities at home. Hate crime is on the rise. The far-right is mobilising. And a cost of living crisis on top of a decade of austerity is pushing millions more towards deprivation. Our people are hurting and money is scarce.
This year of elections further raises the stakes as a critical moment to both deepen accountability but also further entrench anger and polarisation.
People power is our urgent response, but the money doesn’t match
The only way we rise to the scale of this challenge is through community organising.
Organising builds the power of communities marginalised because of who they are or where they are from. Through organising, these communities build countervailing power: that which influences decision-makers and holds formal power to account. To build this power, organising binds communities together in solidarity. It transforms individual agency and it builds the foundations for a more just society.
Social change cannot rely on organising alone. But given the transformational nature of people power, it is concerning that so little social justice grantmaking is going towards this work.
The graph below is from Funding Justice 2 (designed by the Small Axe). This found that just 5.7% of UK foundation giving in 2021/22 went towards work to tackle injustice. This graph maps these grants.
It shows that nearly a third of social justice grants went towards service delivery. Another 37% went to ‘inside game’ work in elite settings.
By contrast, less than 10% of social justice funding went towards ‘outside game’ activities that excluded communities rely on to be heard.
We need to strike a better balance to match the urgency of our times.
Funding for people power requires a significant strategic shift
The end goal of community organising is to build power, rather than to serve predetermined objectives. This is a significant shift for most funders. It requires a fundamental rethink of time, risk, and impact.
Time, because this is long-term, messy, non-linear work.
Risk, because doing this well means ceding control to communities. Our current compliance and governance landscape makes this feel scary. But the big picture risks of not transforming society are far scarier.
Impact, because success is not captured through policy outcomes and measurable metrics alone.
Although it is possible to get forensic about people power!
This is a practice that organisers have thought honed across generations. Rather than imposing their own metrics downwards, funders must start from a place of understanding the craft of organising — how do we know whether power is being built? And measuring success against what communities want and need — what does success look like to this group?
Often, it is the people in control of the money who set the strategy, tactics and everything in between regardless of their proximity to the issue they are trying to address.
Learning from the Democracy, Power and Innovation Fund in the US, our own co-created Learning Framework is seeking to change this
But we stand at a moment of opportunity — if we can work together
While this feels scary, we are optimistic. We have seen first-hand the incredible grassroots work taking place across the country.
And many of our funders are serious about shifting and building power.
If funders significantly shift resources over the long-term, we can help organisers and movements win big.
But we can’t do this alone.
The scale of the shift required cannot be met by one funder or one group. We must collectively invest capital in people power and stay the course.
What have we learnt from our grantmaking?
You find the work by funding it
We learnt that an open process, which prioritised a transparent and simple application process, was key to finding the grassroots work that is:
- rooted in communities
- excluded from traditional grantmaking
- and has the potential to win transformative change.
We often hear funders and social change actors wonder: how do we find this grassroots, lived-experience-led work?
The image below is by Migrants in Culture and is from our grassroots organising conference with #BAMEOnline (now Uncharitable) and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which took place in March 2023.
We heard throughout the conference that people are being asked to share their stories, but their work still isn’t being funded.
The same large, centralised organisations are trusted, while grassroots groups remain starved of resources.
Specialist and open funding is one way to change this — not least because it makes it worth groups’ time to engage!
An open and accessible process matters more to grassroots groups than low ratios
Ratios tell us that funding is too scarce; it is vital that we keep addressing them.
For example, our Community Action Fund was able to support 18 groups out of 90 shortlisted and 900 first stage applicants. If we map the shortlisted funding request to the full 900 potentially in scope applications, we estimate a total funding need of around £13 million. While we are *so happy* that money is getting into the hands of 18 incredible groups, surfacing such significant unmet needs is deeply frustrating.
However, we saw that by making the initial process very accessible (just four short questions, answered by video, voice note or text) and the second process a partnership with the staff team (1–2–1 support to develop a Grant Memo and tackle any due diligence challenges ahead of time), we could give as many candidates as possible a positive experience.
100% of second stage candidates in our open process rated their experience as positive. They were treated with care throughout and left the processes with a helpful Grant Memo; strategy and governance advice; and new funder contacts.
High ratios from open processes reveal the funding gaps we need to work together to address.
And if an open process is designed around their needs, it can also lead to a positive and accessible learning experience for grassroots groups.
We’ve heard so clearly from grassroots groups that funding is opaque, closed and impossible to penetrate. Open processes that centre care and accessibility can start to change this.
Being a specialist matters
We saw how important it was to be a specialist funder for organising.
We are staffed by people with an organising background and a panel of community organisers made the final funding decisions.
This knowledge and precision mattered in finding the groups to fund — those who can have strategic impact across the UK and change the lives of their community.
It also made the process better for applicants; there was a shared understanding of what community organisers face and need.
And it matters in creating an organic culture of trust and learning across our partners and funders — building alliances that win change and changing practice to better resource this work.
Doing this well takes a lot of time and resources
Thanks to many wonderful external partners, we learnt a huge amount about how to streamline this work.
However, running a democratic and participatory process takes both time and money.
Finding the right balance between the power of this open and participatory process, and ensuring that money gets out the door in a timely manner is key. At the same time, there is no substitute for the 1–2–1 relationships we have with our grantee partners. These add so much value on top of the financial resource.
We are a small team of 3 FTE and are intentionally growing very slowly as we want to maintain agility and keep our costs low.
Considering how we do this as we scale up our grantmaking is critical.
Place-based impact is vital but very hard
The best organising starts in place. This is where the relationships that breed community power are forged. As a result, we’re utterly committed to our place-based work alongside our national infrastructure work.
However, it takes a long time to build up credibility in a place. Getting the right balance between early impact, while recognising that it can take 1–2 years to authentically fund in place has been a consistent challenge.
We have pared back our place-based work to stay focussed on Manchester and North Wales (alongside our UK-wide investments) in 2024.
We have also worked to find solid and trusted infrastructure partners in each area who can anchor strategies.
What next for the Civic Power Fund?
2022 was ‘Credential and Connect’, a year of building and demonstrating our organising expertise and building wide and deep relationships vital to the work.
2023 was ‘Find and Fund’, we demonstrated that the work is happening and showed we can move money successfully at scale.
2024 is ‘Consolidate and Innovate’, we want to deepen our relationship with our existing partners, maximising their impact and our shared learning. We also want to build on our lessons from the first two years and secure our own infrastructure and operations.
This means that beyond our North Wales and Alliance for Youth Organising grantmaking, we don’t expect to bring on many new partners in 2024. However, we will continue to work with organisers to innovate around what they need, including building on lessons from our US Learning Exchange and the many migrant rights organisations we work with.
At the end of 2024 we hope to have a robust and sustainable organisation that can step back and focus again on growth.
If you’re keen to dig into all this in more detail, at these links, you can see a full summary of both our:
What are our shared challenges?
Limited bandwidth for grassroots organising
Communities facing the harshest injustices are nurturing their people and patching up service gaps. But several factors are preventing them from building the lasting base of people power that can hold decision-makers to account and win lasting change:
- Lack of community bandwidth. As the cost of living crisis intensifies, community groups are providing vital support to those who are struggling. This leaves them little time or money to focus on the systemic drivers of this crisis. Many communities simply do not have the capacity or practical support to develop leaders; build alliances; and take sustained political action. They need long term resource and support.
- Lack of quality funding for grassroots community organising. The lack of available funding for grassroots organising is compounding these constraints. This includes both the amount of funding available (just 0.3% of funding from UK grantmakers in 2021/2022) but also the long-term, trust-based, unrestricted money we know is vital to the long term success of community organising.
- Short-term and competitive funding approaches. Where funding does exist, it is short-term, small, and often project focused. This is forcing organisations to shift strategy depending on what funding is available where. The sheer scarcity of resources for this work is also creating competition between groups when collaboration is key to impact.
Supporting organisations with the potential to organise, is critical; we can’t expect grassroots groups to be ready to go.
Perceived risk and shrinking civil society space
Many of the groups we work with are operating within a constrained civic environment. They are taking strategic and thoughtful risks in order to build power and win change. But they face hostile politics and policies and often limiting interpretations of charity law. This will likely only deepen in this election year.
We stand by these groups as they stand up for their communities. And we have robust systems in place to ensure the charitability of our grants and the independence and challenging nature of the organisations we fund.
However, as funders it is vital we stand together and prepare for attacks on the work of our groups — preemptively resourcing and supporting our responses.
Sustainability
Sustainability is a challenge for both the work and the Fund. We have had two strong years, which means we are now running a major operation — but still on a year to year basis. This creates two key challenges.
- First, bringing in the money that can keep this operation going. We are fortunate to work with passionate and committed funders who want to shift more resources to the work. But much of our own funding remains short-term or hypothecated. This limits our capacity to make the long-term investments this work needs.
- Second, starting to reduce the intensity of the work, so it is sustainable for the team and the organisation. We have been sprinting for two years and need to slow down as we grow to ensure both a culture of care.
Carrying the operational load while continuing to look forward
Our aspiration is to consolidate and innovate, but consolidation takes a lot of time and uses a different part of our brains. How we both reinforce our growing operational and compliance load and continue to innovate for growth is a key consideration.
Alongside this, we want to maintain strong and robust relationships with our partners. As outlined above, these 1–2–1 relationships and investment in their cause are key to both our values and our impact. Making time for this with a small staff team is a key challenge.
Thank you for making it this far, and thank you again to the hundreds of people and organisations that have shaped the Civic Power Fund over the past few years. None of this is possible with out you, and we are so excited about continuing to work with you to build power and win change.
