Weeknotes 64 (9–13 March)
A visit to Belfast, the next round of the Digital Fund and thinking about leadership.
To open these weeknotes we’d like to signpost the Community Action Response, launched by Eden Project Communities with partners The National Lottery Community Fund, Nextdoor, Neighbourhood Watch, Campaign to End Loneliness and Eco Attractions Group.
Team time
We’ve actually had an unusual amount of team time this week. This was the first week Cassie was back in the office after a month away, Phoebe was back after a 2 week holiday and on Tuesday I went to Belfast to spend some time with Beth. It was great to have the team back together and for me, visiting Beth was particularly valuable. Not only is she a dream to work and hang out with, but she has a brilliant problem-solving mind and so much expertise on grantmaking that has really helped shape my work at a time when I was feeling a bit overwhelmed with the size of the task at hand. This is what she had to say about this time:
“As we work remotely, its rare we get the opportunity to work alongside each other so this week was a real treat. We also spent some time reflecting on the great progress Melissa has made on the sharing of good digital grantmaking practice throughout the Fund, and thinking about the future.”
Also — we saw a seal in the river Lagan, which Beth said she’d never seen despite living in Belfast her entire life! It was a moment of true joy.
Good Digital Grantmaking
As well as meeting with Beth and other colleagues in Northern Ireland, I was also there to deliver another workshop to test out our good digital grantmaking materials. I’ve started informally using the term ‘better digital grantmaking’, because it feels a bit softer and more processual, which feels useful for the testing stage. I’m not yet sure which is best/if it matters, because as we said in our update for the CEO report to the March board yesterday,
“We’d encourage staff to think about these ‘good digital grantmaking’ practices as just good grantmaking practices for the future.”
16 people joined us for the workshop, the majority of whom work in funding teams, which was a brilliant turn out. We shared an introduction to the Digital Fund and our strands of work, a talk and discussion around how the sector understands ‘digital’, a very light-version of what technology can afford and ran an exercise around it’s this, not that. This gave us good insight into where they’re at with knowledge, understanding and confidence around this topic, ideas about what to change about our approach and materials, as well as specifics about Northern Irish context. Beth co-facilitated and shared some thoughts,
“ This is the first of these sessions I’ve attended, which has been great to validate my belief that the experience of grantmaking that colleagues here all already have puts them well on the road to good digital grantmaking — many of the skills are the same!”
In the last 6 weeks I have run 6 sessions across every one of our offices in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This feels like a big achievement, so that’s something I’m celebrating! These have been learning events, by which I mean learning events for both participants to learn about what we’re working on and what digital grantmaking is, and for us to listen to where they’re at and learn about what they need. This feels like a natural place to pause this stage of testing, so I’ll be spending the next 2 weeks updating the materials to version 2, before moving on to a new phase of testing and sharing.
We also put up some more posters around the London office, which were designed as part of this set of materials to try to encourage more awareness and critical thinking about technology, digital & data amongst colleagues.
UK Funding Committee
Over the past few weeks I have helped work on the paper we put forward for the next round of the Digital Fund, which Cassie and Beth presented at the UK funding committee meeting on Thursday. Here’s what Cassie had to say about it:
My main focus was on preparing for the UK Committee meeting which we had yesterday. The UK committee meets every 3 months and is our opportunity to get decisions made — it’s our main governance function. After 2 months of user research and writing up recommendations into a paper we got the next round of the Digital Fund signed off, so expect a announcement about that in the next few weeks. I was also given a 20 mins slot to share some of my initial thinking (crowdsourced through many others too) about where the UK Portfolio might start to focus in the coming months/ years as I take on my new role. Again, more on that soon.
It’s so exciting that we got the next round of the Digital Fund signed off! As Cassie says, the announcement will come soon, but to manage expectations, because we have a remaining budget of £2.4m it will look very different to the larger first round.
Beth also noted that in an attempt to limit travel where possible, this meeting was conducted primarily via video conferencing. This worked out really well and was a great example of how our working practices can respond to external changes (for example, the collapse of Flybe has had a big impact on colleagues located in Northern Ireland).
Round 1 cohort
We had two great blogs posted by some of the support partners this week, including one on collective progress by Nick Stanhope (Shift) and another on leadership coaching in large-scale change by Cat Ainsworth (Dot Project). This week, Phoebe has been digging deep into this theme because, as she explains:
This month’s theme for the grantholder insight and learning is ‘leadership’ and I have been sorting, going through and following up on the responses from the monthly grantholder Typeform survey — as well as doing a bit of background reading about leadership in complex change, preparing for a blogpost and other content on the topic.
This work builds up to a learning event she’s organising at the end of the month called Leadership in complex, large-scale change — stories from the field. At the same time, she is preparing for April’s theme of ‘responsible technology’ and speaking with grantholders who are writing blogposts, and will be contributing to the grantholder learning event in April.
Micro organisations discovery research
Beth & Cassie spoke to Stripe Partners to talk through the final draft of their final report and recommendations, which will be shared soon. This feels like a particularly poignant time to be thinking about what micro organisations, community groups and small charities need to thrive and about how we as funder can be adaptive and responsive to their needs.
