Live fieldnotes — Liverpool
For our final week of fieldwork, we’re talking to micro-organisations based in and around Liverpool. You can also read our summary of what we learned this week or catch up on all of our fieldwork blogs.
Day 4
Today we met Louisa, director of Liverpool SOUP. Louisa set up Liverpool SOUP last year after trying to find and donate to grassroots projects in her local community, and realising how difficult this can be. SOUP is a micro-funding event concept that started in Detroit and has since been replicated in cities worldwide. Members of the public are invited to listen to pitches from several local grassroots projects. Guests pay a donation on the door, for which they receive a bowl of soup and one vote to cast for their favourite pitch. The winning project is awarded the total pot of donations. In this sense, the model is democratic and community-led, letting local people decide which initiatives they want to help get off the ground.
We were lucky enough to be in town for Louisa’s third Liverpool SOUP event. Before the big night, we sat down with Louisa and heard about the main challenges she’s facing:
- SOUP is looking to support tiny grassroots projects (often just one person) that would benefit from a small pot of funding to kick-start their work. However, it’s a challenge to ensure a large number of diverse projects apply. Many don’t know about SOUP and even those that do often assume they aren’t eligible. Louisa invests considerable time in spreading the word and encouraging applications by flyering, going on local radio and keeping an active presence on social media. She also purposefully moves the event to a venue in a different neighbourhood each time, to maximise exposure across the city.
“I want applicants to be a strong reflection of all of Liverpool. I don’t think we’re there yet. People assume they need a bank account to pitch, or to be registered. We have work to do to communicate that it’s truly grassroots organisations we’re trying to reach.”
- Louisa has been the driving force behind the past three Liverpool SOUP events. As well as spending much of her evenings and weekends working on SOUP, she’s financed the overhead costs and first two events using her own money. While she’s been happy to do this so far, it is not a sustainable model in the long-term.
“It’s a lot more time and money than I thought it would be. I’ve been happy to do it, I’m not resentful, but it’s not sustainable.”
- Louisa applied for some grant funding but has not so far been successful. She reflected on the difficulty of positioning SOUP to funders— “it’s tricky, it’s a bit meta. I’m looking for money to give people money”. Today’s event was sponsored by two local businesses. Louisa thinks this is the most promising direction for the future — as relatively low-cost stand-alone events, SOUPs lend themselves to SME sponsorship.
Today we spent the day at Kindfulness Coffee Club in Bootle, talking to Mandy and Zoe who run the charity. Supported by volunteers, they work hard running the daily cafe drop-in sessions, group activities, the charity shop, offer counselling services, signpost people to other services, and run a Baby Bank to help new mothers with essential supplies. The local area is one of the most deprived areas in the UK and there is little or no local trust in the statutory services. Kindfulness, however, has built up strong trust in the area and has become a crisis point for people who are in need of desperate help, often coming to them before, or as a medium between, the local statutory services.
“They think they’re after their money, or want to put their kids in care, or take away their power. Once they meet them then it’s ok, but people have a closed door here. You won’t be let in without building trust before.”
They rely heavily on the charity shop (which is a treasure trove of donations) to bring in essential income to help pay the rent, running costs and salaries needed to keep the place going. They tried applying for a grant to help cover their running costs but were turned down as they couldn’t guarantee that they would still be running a year’s time. However, Mandy argued that a lot of the time this is inherent in being a charity — the reason they couldn’t guarantee that they would be here next year was the reason that they were applying for the funding in the first place.
“We’re living so hand-to-mouth that we can’t look into the future. It’s exhausting. What we do is cheap, we’re really cheap, but the benefits reach so far and wide. We just want some funding to keep us open and to not worry every day.”
Social prescribing has also caused a bit of a problem for them. Although Mandy and Zoe fully support the concept of social prescribing, they are frustrated that they don’t receive any funding from them to help them to continue to offer the services that are relied on by the social prescribers.
“There’s only so many people that you can support.”
Zoe also spoke strongly about the problem of trying to quantify people and show the ‘number of people’ that you have helped — “You can’t put a number on it. You can’t just tell me that we need to get 10 people through the door when actually what we need to do is help that one person who doesn’t have any family, is grieving and just needs is to spend time with us over a cup of tea each day.” Zoe told us how they have saved a number of lives by building up trust and giving people the space to open up to them, investing time in them and supporting them in a way that is best for them.
“You can’t say, we’ll give you £100,000 to get in a certain number of people through the door, it doesn’t work like that.
Mandy’s wish for the future is that “nobody in Bootle is sitting alone” and would love there to be a Kindfulness-type cafe in every place. The work they are doing is essential for the local community, acting as physical and mental life-line, they have saved many people’s lives and continue to support many more.
Day 3
We spent the day with Lynne, the founder and director of Crea8ing Careers. Crea8ing Careers was originally established in London to provide employability training to young people. While the core mission of improving young people’s futures has remained, Lynne’s approach has shifted towards focussing on parents and professionals.
“We started with career skills. Then we realised we need to work on mental health and resilience. Then parenting. Then professionals. Now I think we need to change the system. Somebody has to be brave and stand up and say let’s do it differently.”
Since deciding to pursue this new direction in The Wirral in 2017, Crea8ing Careers and their training courses have taken off at lightning speed. Lynne credits this rise in part to the connections she was able to build through a unique network on The Wirral. Communities of Practice is an asset based community development network that meets every 6–8 weeks:
“COP is the most undervalued resource we have on the Wirral. It’s absolutely amazing. You get to find out who the tiniest-just-had-an-idea people are, right up to well established organisations.”
Sitting in on a meeting between Lynne and her business development advisor, we were able to see first hand how challenging it can be for organisations with a complex programme of activities to manage funding. Having applied for many grants, they are in a position where one set of training courses is over-funded and another is under-funded. Unable to simply reallocate funds, they worked through their options, trying to figure out where there was room for movement in the thorny configuration of funder priorities, community centre schedules, facilitator availability and variable course costs.
“Everything needs to be project-based. How do I break up my projects? It is all utterly arbitrary from our point of view, we just run this thing. I’d like to say, ‘this is what we do, please can you offer us some pennies for what we do?’ That unrestricted core funding is so hard to find.”
In line with the organisation’s principle of supporting lasting change through wellbeing and resilience building, participants are often encouraged to get involved as volunteers after completing courses. It can be challenging to match work needs with individuals’ skills and preferences, and Lynne invests considerable time and energy on coaching and managing an ever-growing number of people.
We met with the Wirral Society and were invited along to their monthly committee meeting. The charity was formed back in 1928 with the aim of protecting the natural environment of the Wirral peninsula. Today they work hard to continue this mission, promoting sustainable development, protecting the Green Belt and open spaces, and lobbying against environmental and planning issues.
Many of the members became involved in The Wirral Society’s committee as representatives from other local interest groups as The Wirral Society takes an interest in the whole peninsula. However, the makeup of the committee has changed over the years from being mainly “public-spirited businessmen with time and money”, to now having an entire committee made up of retirees. They struggle to find people to join the committee as people need to have an interest in the Wirral as a whole and not just a small area of it. They have also found that the older demographic do not have as much time as they used to as many people now look after grandchildren as both parents work. They have found that people are willing to pay the membership fees but not actually give over any of their time.
As a committee made up of an older demographic, they struggle with certain digital aspects. They have thought about going on Facebook to try and reach a wider audience but they don’t understand social media. Although someone offered to teach them, they wouldn’t help with the upkeep of it and no one else felt confident taking it on. They have a newsletter that goes out 3 times a year but “as soon as it’s gone to print it’s out of date.” It also costs them a lot of money to send them through the post to those members who are not on email.
They do not apply for outside funding as annual membership fees keep them going, along with a treasurer who invests their funds to keep their bank balance healthy. Their financial position enables them to support other small conservation and environmental groups with micro-pots of funding to help with projects. For example, they donated some money to help a park group buy gardening gloves and hedge cutters for a cleanup project they were running.
Day 2
Today we spent the day shadowing Diana, the founder of Wirral Unplugged, a grassroots community interest group (CIC). Wirral Unplugged promotes ‘screen-free Sundays’ for children by running a 2hr educational session each week. Their aim is to ‘create creative kids’ through a variety of different craft activities, guest speakers, reading sessions and scavenger hunts that follow a different theme each week. They want to be able to equip kids to be more creative, resilient and innovative as they grow up.
Diana has a background in education and so is keen to make sure that the volunteers are learning and gaining skills/experience as much as the children. She has linked up with the Liverpool Guild of Students Volunteering Service to recruit student volunteers. The Guild has a portal where they advertise volunteering opportunities from local organisations and match up students with specific opportunities that relate to their interests, time commitments, skills they have, and skills they are looking to gain.
As a new CIC (under a year old), Diana has faced a number of challenges with the start-up process:
- “People don’t understand what a CIC is and so it’s met with scepticism. People don’t understand where the money is going. I tend to use ‘not-for-profit’ instead as it’s clearer that way that I’m not making money off it.”
- Gaining legitimacy for her concept is a challenge that she faces as a new organisation. To help this she tries to partner up with other well-known local organisations and has found that being based in a library also helps as it is a trusted site which works to reinforce her emphasis on education. However, the challenge for legitimacy is still ongoing.
- Diana is conscious of keeping the entry price to a minimum to make it as accessible as possible, but she still needs to cover her costs. She tried running it off donations but found that it was unsustainable. However, she recently lost out on funding because of the entry fees being seen as a barrier for lower-income families. Diana’s current challenge is to therefore work out how to be sustainable whilst still being as accessible as possible.
Diana’s hope for the future is to open up more centres around the country, starting a national movement towards an increased awareness of the impacts of digital technology on wellbeing and the future skills of children as they grow up and enter employment.
We met Rachael, who established Croxteth Community Garden less than a year ago. Rachael’s core motivation is to connect local children with the magic of growing food and improve their access to fresh produce. Beyond this, she’d like the garden to be used and enjoyed by all different groups in the community.
“I don’t want it to be my garden that people help out at. I want it to be a proper community garden, where all different ages, abilities, whoever can just come, know its their garden, take some food.”
After first having the idea, things moved quickly for Rachael —in the space of a few weeks, she found an unused plot of land behind a community learning centre and then pitched and won £485 at Liverpool’s first SOUP event. Over the following months, she worked on setting up the garden. However, she’s faced significant obstacles along the way:
- Anti-social behaviour is the garden’s biggest challenge. The land backs onto a park and was previously used by groups of young people — “it’s like we’re stepping on their turf”. Despite efforts to secure the space, it has been repeatedly broken into, leaving torn-down fences, broken glass and one time a knife. This severely limits what they can do in the garden — they turned down a free greenhouse for fear it would get smashed.
- The garden struggles with visibility. Tucked behind a building and locked beyond a fence, there is no organic footfall and so people only hear about the garden through Rachael’s concerted publicity efforts (leaflets and social media) — “people don’t know we’re there. Even in the area, people wouldn’t know.”
Rachael is now determined to relocate the garden. She’s trying to persuade the council to let her use a plot of open land bordered by busy roads. She reached out to a nearby mental health unit, retirement home and 2 local primary schools, and all are supportive of the idea and would like to get involved in the garden. Talking to more established community gardens in neighbouring towns has been a source of reassurance for Rachael:
“They’ve had to persevere and work at it for 3 years, so that’s why I’m upbeat about it. The best advice they gave was to start small — go slowly, then you’ll gradually bring the community on board.”
Day 1
We spent the day with the Liverpool and Merseyside Beekeepers Association — a branch of the Lancashire Beekeepers Association and affiliated with the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA). They are an established group that has been running successfully for many years.
As a small self-sufficient group, they rarely apply for grants and are not particularly interested in large pots of funding because of the number of conditions and reporting requirements involved. Due to the time-consuming nature of beekeeping, coupled with the annual reporting obligations they have to the BBKA, the committee doesn’t feel like they have time to spend on further reporting. However, they are happy with their current financial position, relying on membership fees, monthly raffles, gift aid returns, and beginners course fees.
Although the association has a long history, managing the organisation today brings with it its own challenges:
- John (Secretary) and Cliff (Education Officer) spoke of the problems with getting people to volunteer and stand for committee roles. A couple of the older long-standing members would like to step down, but they haven’t been able to find someone to replace them, partly due to the time commitment each role currently requires:
“It’s a bit of a catch 22 situation — because there’s few people, it asks a lot of time from each individual. I think it’s something that we’ve got to work on and think about more.”
- John (Secretary) is responsible for organising monthly talks and lectures for the group. However, the internet has dramatically changed this role. Nowadays, information about beekeeping is easily accessible, and so John feels under pressure to find speakers who bring something new to the table that members cannot access online.
“We need to give people a reason to join. The reason the association was set up all those years ago was to educate people about beekeeping. Now we need to get speakers that really stand out because otherwise there’s always options for people to just learn online.”
Today we met Amy, the CEO of Make It Happen, a community hub, pay-as-you-feel shop and social supermarket in Birkenhead on The Wirral.
Amy is passionate about asset-based community development (ABCD), which is all about making use of the skills, resources and capabilities that a community already has, rather than focussing on what it lacks. This approach runs through every aspect of Make It Happen’s work:
- They have strong relationships with local businesses and work through ‘give and gain’ exchanges to trade respective resources.
- Customers can pay for items in the shop using means other than money — one customer comes and irons clothing, while another helps out by making use of scrap fabric.
- They provide volunteer opportunities for people who may not otherwise have access to training and development — “I love people being able to say I can rather than I can’t”.
Volunteer mentoring has become a huge part of Amy’s job —she spends up to 5 hours a day coaching her 20-odd volunteers. Beyond teaching them how to run the shop, she’s always at the end of the phone to help them out with housing issues, references and general life skills. Managing volunteers is Amy’s biggest challenge, but also her biggest reward:
“It’s a labour of love. It wasn’t the plan at the beginning. I do so much for them. But nurturing volunteers is our USP. It’s a unique environment — people can learn and grow.”
Make It Happen is a Company Limited by Guarantee. Amy considered registering as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation but decided it was incompatible with her ABCD ethics and commitment to building resilience, not reliance.
“When they asked me what the referral process is to access our service (which we’re not) and what needs we’re addressing (which we don’t), I said no. The language I use it not of a charity, of fixing people in need. That doesn’t empower people.”
While the long-term plan is to be self-sustaining, Make It Happen currently relies on some outside funding, which can be challenging to access without charitable status. Amy outsources looking for funding to a local business consultancy.
