Weekly summary — Dundee

We’re now halfway through our fieldwork and deeply immersed in the day-to-day experiences of micro-organisations around the U.K.

Our second week on the road brought us to Dundee. Here, we saw similarities to Swansea in the main challenges areas faced by small scale organisations with ‘finance and funding’, ‘skills and capability gaps’, and ‘looking after self and others’ all being significant hurdles encountered by both sets of groups. However, there were several things that stood out as new or distinct.

The most striking thing we learnt about Dundee was how active and highly networked its community organisations are. It became apparent that most people we met throughout the week knew, or knew of, one another (making for a very friendly and chatty end of week workshop!). This may partly be explained by the size of the city; with a population just shy of 150,000, Dundee is considerably smaller than Swansea. The organisations we visited were also concentrated in a smaller area in, or close to, Dundee centre, whereas in Swansea we travelled further afield to towns and villages in the surrounding area.

“Everybody in Dundee knows everybody.” — Sandra, Dundee Mental Health Cairn Fowk

Aside from this, we heard from some of our participants how a strong community network and active volunteering culture had evolved in Dundee partly out of necessity to meet gaps in service provision. According to Volunteer Dundee, over 30,000 people volunteer locally each year, one of the highest figures in Scotland. We also heard of several prevalent local government initiatives to support community work that some of our participants were benefitting from, for example, the Dundee Partnership Community Regeneration Fund.

As in Swansea, most of the micro-organisations we spoke to had a future vision for ‘doing well’ that involved growing or expanding in some way within the local community. However, what was unique was a concern around how to ‘grow well’.

Growing, even at a small scale, requires more resources, which likely means more time taken up with fundraising and the paperwork that comes with it. This was particularly unwelcome for CanDu and Dundee Mental Health Cairn Fowk because of the nature of their work as lived experience support organisations, where listening and empathy through personal experience are at the heart of what they do.

“I didn’t sign up for a desk job…I said to myself, if fundraising ever took over the work we do, then we’d scale back the service.” — Julie, CanDu

Most of the groups we spoke to weren’t aiming for large pots of funding (>£10,000) but were rather looking for something a bit bigger than the smallest grants available (<£500). However, even in this range, funding usually comes with a lot of stipulations, heavy reporting requirements and a lengthy application form. The people we spoke to want to be able to use small funds more flexibly to cover whatever needs the organisation has at a given time, including core costs, parts of salaries and volunteer welfare. We also heard a sense of frustration that funders don’t really understand the work organisations are doing — if they did, they would more likely trust organisations to spend as they see fit.

“No funders give us money and say, ‘do what you want with it and do what you think is best’, so we prefer to fundraise our own money. That way we don’t answer to anyone but our members.” — Dundee Mental Health Cairn Fowk

All this concern underpins the fact that these organisations see ‘growing well’ as being able to keep the core values that they started with — people helping other people.

Therefore, in our end-of-week workshop, we asked the groups to share strategies and ideas for how to ‘grow well’. We heard:

• Some groups prefer to fundraise themselves, avoiding grant funding completely so that they can keep autonomy over how they spend the money.
• Others look for grants but are selective, avoiding any that would mean compromising their current way of working.
• All expressed a desire for funding to be based on a more trusting relationship, with fewer conditions for moderate pots of money.
• New ideas for alternative application formats were discussed, with the groups suggesting that a face-to-face visit (like ours), or a video, would be more effective at telling the story of what their organisation is doing than trying to explain it through an online form. It would also be more time-efficient.

“Stripe knows more about our organisation from spending one day with us than any 25 page form could ever tell you. Face-to-face is so important.” — Julie, CanDu

We also heard about a second unique challenge experienced by micro-organisations in Dundee, stemming from the distinctive context mentioned above. While a tightly connected community network is positive in many ways (for example, Darryl’s vision for a community currency rests on the possibility of collaboration between local organisations), it can lead to particular issues. Many of the micro-organisations we met were in some way linked to, and often dependent upon, a larger organisation. This inherent power imbalance has been a source of tension for several organisations. At times when these tensions inevitably came to a head, there was a lack of mediation or chance to take the dispute to someone ‘higher’.

While challenging, we realised together in the workshop that this is a big opportunity area for funders. Some of the ideas that emerged were:

• Getting funding for central resources that a number of community organisations can all use. For example, a publicity service for all the different organisations would be a helpful resource for increasing local visibility. Another example could be to fund a central hub for volunteer training which could help address the lack of business skills and the pressures that come with having to learn everything on the job.
• Funding for umbrella organisations. For example, the two food larders we met this week, Food for Thought and Kirkton Larder, have recently come together with the other larders in the area to form a group called ‘Dundee Food Poverty Alliance’. Instead of looking for small pots individually, the group hopes to apply as a collective for a larger pot to buy a van. This van could then be used by their main food distributor to ease the current logistical pressures they are struggling with, which often affects the individual larders down the line.

These suggestions came with an important caveat. While funding central resources or umbrella organisations has great potential, it is vital to ensure accountability and transparency to avoid any one organisation holding too much sway within the community. Funding for an independent mediation service could be a helpful way to safeguard against this.

Finally, we came across more digital challenges in Dundee than in Swansea. In particular, organisations found the development and upkeep of brands, websites and social media difficult and time-consuming. We heard some great strategies that are already in use to address these challenges:

• Eddie, from Kirkton Larder, uses youth brand ambassadors. He encourages young people to volunteer and gives them responsibility for the larder’s social media. In this way, he makes use of the skills already in his community.
• Eddie also proactively searched for pro bono opportunities for brand and website development. He scoured the internet for contact details and reached out to a long list of companies to see if they’d help, and was eventually successful. It was suggested that it would be helpful for other organisations to have a central resource showing such opportunities.

Next week we’re heading to Derry for our third week of fieldwork — stay tuned for more live fieldnotes along the way.