A context letter from the Fund Circle

A letter from the Fund Circle, shared with community members who did not receive funding from the Practice Fund this year.

In Year 2 of the Collective Imagination Practice Community, there has been a lot of growth in interest and demand for the Practice Fund that we steward (resourced by JRF’s Emerging Futures Team and Arising Quo). This is unsurprising: the fund is a unique opportunity to access micro-funding for experimental practice that is notoriously difficult to resource. In total we have now funded 71 requests out of 309 received over the course of our 18 months of activity.

The growing awareness and demand has intensified some of the tensions that the Fund Circle members hold on behalf of the community. In the interest of transparency, honesty and care we wrote a ‘context letter’ to those who did not receive funding this year — so many of whom made a request that met all of our criteria and more. We wanted to share a bit more about our process and experience. Being told ‘no’ can be such a dispiriting experience, but more often than not a ‘no’ from the Fund Circle reflects the limits to what we can distribute more than anything else. And it felt important that we could communicate this.

We would love to see the Practice Fund continue beyond its second year, which would allow us to unpick lots of knotty questions about how we can best distribute the resources — as well as enabling us to continue to fund such an array of brilliant initiatives and test beds.

Here’s the letter that we sent:

Dear Collective Imagination Practice Community members,

Firstly we want to say a huge thank you for your interest in the Practice Fund and for all the care and imagination that went into your request.

As you will have read we received more fund requests in this round than in year 1. This means that there are many wonderful things, which meet all the criteria and more, which we haven’t been able to support. In practice this means we received 166 fund requests, but are only able to approve 25.

This has been a challenge for us in the Fund Circle, and we wanted to offer some more insight into our process and the tensions we’ve experienced, for those who are interested (and because it feels healthy to share openly where possible).

Some of the tensions we’re experiencing include:

• There’s a core dissonance in holding the Fund Circle — between our intention to nurture the community and the increasingly competitive process for allocating the Practice Fund
• Growing pains — our desire to support existing community members to deepen and continue their work, whilst giving new members and new audiences a chance to engage
• Working with a light touch — our desire to play our roles with care, and the limitations in terms of how much time is resourced for us to spend as a Fund Circle
• We’re all going deeper, ourselves, the community and our funders — we have an increasingly nuanced understanding of collective imagination practice, and we need to fund things that will tell a strong story to funders both now and in the future

These tensions have been there since the beginning, but the growing demand for the Fund has intensified them. To cope with this volume we iterated our process, adding another step to create a shortlist (that we discussed to a depth which we couldn’t take all 166 requests), and bringing in some new lenses, including a visualisation of everything we funded in year 1, to understand where there might be gaps in our emerging collective story. But ultimately we just had to make some very difficult choices.

It feels important to say that we’re aware of the privileged position we’re in: to read these requests and make decisions on behalf of the community. And, we also feel aware that the growth in interest in the collective imagination space is shifting how we’re having to work. Sometimes it feels like we’re being pulled away from the values and intentions that we shaped and shared with you.

This shift is not inherently negative, but it does bring up questions about how we can continue to steward the fund beyond this year, if we’re lucky enough to do so. For example we’re curious about how the fund might stay proportional to the size of the community, as it grows or shifts.

So for those of you who have made requests, particularly to those who have been contributing a lot to the community and who we haven’t been able to fund this time, we hope this is not the end of the story and that there will be more opportunities.

In the meantime we really hope you will find other ways to take your initiatives forward and we hope to see you at an open session soon.

Tim, Kass, Zahra

The Fund Circle

If you’d like to get in touch with the Fund Circle, you can do so via fund@imaginationpractice.info