Power Shift Reflections #2: Moving to a Participatory and Co-Created Funding Model in Academia
Helen Featherstone and Dean Veall have been part of our Power Shift Cohort through University of Bath. They came to the cohort with the hope of exploring how to launch a co-created and participatory research fund, they share how they approached and their key take-aways, including the ways that being transformational can sometimes appear not transformational at all.
The funding call for participatory research in University of Bath has recently gone live. So how did we go from the idea of changing our funding model to a live call?
We’ve been using the development of this funding call as our live project / challenge whilst participating in the Power Shift programme. You can read about our rationale for this in a previous blog post. This post will focus on what we’ve actually done to create the call, and what we’ve taken from the Power Shift process to inform the process of co-creation.
Let’s start with the things we’ve taken from Power Shift Learning Journey:
- Proportionality — being truly participatory can feel like you have to involve everyone, everywhere, all at once. We reflected that over-engaging can waste resource (are we spending more on the process of creating a call than on the money we’ll be distributing through the call?) and not suit everyone’s approach to contributing (some people will just want to know that a due process has been followed rather than be part of the process).
- Governance — while we were concerned about governance for the call, we realised that we needed to put governance around ourselves. This allowed us to let people know of our plans and influence them. Of course, this is good practice in an of itself, but it also afforded us a level of protection should things not go quite according to plan or should people react badly when the call comes out.
- Care — we often talk about doing no harm through our work, but should we not all feel better from what we do? How can we be more caring in what we do?
- Reciprocity — being relational in our work, and in the work we support, so that we step away from the conventional transaction of time for money. We loved the discussions from Dark Matter Labs on this, and also note that NIHR recognise that being involved with research is not “work”
- Reflective — we’ve always taken a reflective approach to our work and are strong proponents of piloting work to learn before we scale it up or embed it into our everyday practice. We took a new phrase from the Power Shift “good enough to progress, safe enough to try” which we think is helpful in bringing others along with potentially radical ideas.
With these in mind, we took a paper to the University’s Research Culture Working Group which outlined our proposed approach to developing the funding call. There was general support for the proposal with only one question about how to sustain this model of funding if it was successful. To
be honest, I was a little surprised at how little discussion there was in that meeting. But on reflection, I realised that we’d laid the groundwork many months previously with our overall approach to the work we are doing and there had been regular updates. What was potentially radical, was actually a logical progression from where we’d started. And it’s worth noting that this initiative is built on a decade of our previous work which has only gone well. We are a well-respected and trusted team within the University and I think this affords us a certain amount of grace for what we do, and how
we do it.
Developing the call
To develop the call itself we ran a series of workshops with members of community organisations and academics from across the Faculties / School. When we were first thinking about who to involve
in this process we kept adding more and more people with relevant expertise and in an attempt to be inclusive of all viewpoints. But this was rapidly becoming unwieldy and really wasn’t proportionate (key learning from Power Shift!). So we decided to keep it at light-touch as possible; two people from community organisations, four academics and ourselves.
Taking learning from a previous project (Community Matters) we ran the first workshop twice: once with the community members, and once with the academics. This was to ensure that one group didn’t dominate over the other — particularly where opinions or perceptions may differ. In the first
workshop we discussed key terms: participatory, research, and funding. This was a real eye-opening exercise as there were some distinct differences between the groups and within the groups. The second workshop brought everyone together to discuss the key terms and make a first attempt to agree definitions.
A major part of the second workshop was to discuss the parameters for the funding. The third workshop looked at the detail of the call: goals and premises, call approach and criteria, levels of funding, assessment panel, the support we would need to provide, and ethical considerations. Much of these issues had emerged from the discussions in workshop two. The funding call is now live and you can see the information and guidance online.
At the time of writing (24 hours after going live!) — we’ve already had enquiries from community groups outside of the University which is a real success for us. It’s a sign that we have produced something that doesn’t
only speak to the academic community within the University which is what we really wanted to see happen.
There is still a long way to go. We don’t know how many people will enquire, who they will be, if the call makes sense to people, who will get funded, what types of work will be funded, and then what will happen once people start on those pieces of work. But this is a useful staging point to take stock of what we’ve done so far.
So, what have we taken from the co-creation process?
- Some people we invited didn’t understand what we were asking of them — most people only interact with funding calls by applying for them. Some may sit on the assessment panels. To actually create a funding call is a real privilege that not many of us get to do. Being invited to create a funding call was so far from how people normally interact with funding it was an
impossible ask. Our community members who were involved with the process had experience of distributing funding and using different approaches to distribution. This was a significant help as our academic members were much less familiar with different approaches
to funding. - Being proportionate worked. The small number of people involved was sufficient to have diversity and representation. Of course, when it comes to seeing how applies and who gets funding we’ll be able to see how the diversity plays out.
- There was a lot of difference in how we all thought about research. This was reflected in differences in how research could be conceived (a cycle with different stages or a series of un-related projects), when it starts (at the idea stage or when the funding lands in the bank), and what “counts” as research (eg it can be synthesising existing knowledge into new knowledge, as well as collecting new data)
- We’ve had to relax our hard-line stance on being participatory. While the rationale for taking this approach was that we can’t fund participatory research if the funding call isn’t participatory we are going to end up funding work that isn’t truly participatory through this
call! This is because we have to accept that not everyone is ready for participatory approaches and they may need to develop their practices from where they are now towards participation. - We’ve really opened up what the funding can be used for — it’s OK to spend money on eg events for people rather than just a transaction of time for money. This is about supporting the reciprocal and relational aspects of participatory work (more Power Shift learning!).
- When we talked about assessment panels, there was a consensus that we could do the assessment as the process had been robust.
- Risks are things we will encounter and we have to manage them, we can’t eliminate them.
- Some of our decisions have excluded people (particularly PhD researchers) and we’ll need to explain why that is the case.
- And finally, we started by calling our process participatory, but it was pointed out that the people who would be applying for the funding weren’t in the room so it wasn’t truly participatory. We now say that we co-created the call.
I’m pleased with what we’ve got to and am really looking forward to the ideas that we see coming in. But outside of that, my biggest reflection is about the nature of being radical or transformational, particularly in a large, traditional organisation. We’ve been at the University of Bath since 2012 which has given us good grounding. Our remit has always been one of change and challenging the status quo. But we are also used to operating within the constraints of our institutional and sectoral habits. I doubt we would have taken this approach, or indeed had the relatively smooth passage so far, a decade ago. There is something about understanding the conditions that you are operating in and the foundations you have that can help inform just how transformational you can be (whilst also not
appearing to be transformational at all!).
