For many small and frontline charities, the early stages of the pandemic catalysed a radical transformation of local partnerships and collaborations. Public bodies, infrastructure bodies and larger charities recognised the vital role of small charities in reaching the most vulnerable quickly, and two years later many of our funded charities report that increases in their influence within their community have been sustained. The emergency prompted more and better collaboration.
For grant-makers, collaboration does not always come instinctively. One of the most significant assets of Foundations – our independence – can incentivise going it alone. As for the charities we support, the onset of the pandemic quickly revealed limitations of that mindset, and the interdependency of the sector. Collaborations that started as informal intelligence sharing in networks of grant-makers and infrastructure organisations led to formal and informal partnership working of all kinds, unlocking a joint response that helped organise and deliver support to frontline organisations.
What did we do?
The Foundation entered into pooled funding with other grant-makers. During 2020, the Foundation was successful in applying to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s Community Match Challenge programme in order to leverage an additional £5m of matched funding for frontline charities. We also awarded funds on behalf of the Health Foundation.
The Foundation worked with the national infrastructure membership bodies for charities – NVCO, ACEVO, ProBono Economics, CFG and others – to present a united front to government for civil society through the #NeverMoreNeeded Campaign. The Foundation was the only funder in this partnership, which meant that we were able to represent not only the views and needs of the small and local charities we partner with, but also the grant-maker perspective.
We collaborated with other funders, including assessing applications on behalf of other funders to deliver grants at speed – including the Wales Community Foundation and the London Community Response fund coordinated by London Funders. We brokered access to the Foundation’s portfolio of development support for frontline charities working with refugees and asylum seekers through the Respond and Adapt programme coordinated by Refugee Action.
Alongside a group of other funders, we supported the Association of Charitable Foundations to build the Funders Collaborative Hub, a network, set of resources and good practice that can help connect funders with shared goals. This recognises that not all funders can or should do the same things – and indeed that there is power in loose ties – but that a shared understanding of roles and assets can help us to better align our work.
In six communities across England and Wales, we worked locally in a different way: to bring people who live and work in a community together to tackle the societal issues they most wanted to change. Crucially, this was not through leading with funding, but through facilitation, convening and critical friendship. The ability of the Foundation to encourage, sustain and manage relationships with local partners who are sometimes in conflict was critical to the journey. This approach helped us answer the critical learning question: what works and what doesn’t, in stimulating and supporting lasting societal change?
Partnership working is possible without compromising your integrity. Early clarity on how any partnership aligns to our own strategy allowed us to qualify partnership opportunities that don’t lead to mission drift.
What we achieved
Our partnership funding with DCMS allowed us to reach 135 charities with core funding in the winter of 2020/21, giving them the capacity to sustain a blend of in-person and remote delivery of their support, alongside additional services to tackle food poverty, isolation and mental health. Because the Foundation was able to act as the primary grantee and use information we already held on charities, we could carry the administrative burden, rather than pass all of this onto the funded charities at a time of extreme pressure for frontline organisations. This was much appreciated by the charities.
The #NeverMoreNeeded campaign helped to raise the profile of the critical role of civil society in responding to the first wave of the pandemic and build evidence for a package of support from Government that recognised the distinctive situation of charities as they differed from the private and public sector.
The independent evaluation of our work in six communities identified five main impacts of the way in which the Foundation collaborated with local partners to work towards improving services, opportunities and potential of local people:
- Creating space and conditions to think differently
- Skills and expertise not available within the local system – introducing ideas, models and evidence from elsewhere
- Independence and an outside perspective - ability to see local assets, rather than the deficits often prioritised locally
- Connection to the other communities to share learning
- Vote of confidence – they’re worth supporting and they can make change happen
However, the evaluation also identified that building trust with communities and the subsequent pace of work had been slow, particularly given we actively selected communities where civil society had suffered from under-investment. It identified the need to evolve our relationship with community partners so that the Foundation can provide constructive challenge when needed without diminishing trust or exerting inappropriate power.
What we learned
Collaboration takes many forms – pooled funding is the tip of the iceberg. Being open to a wide range of partnerships – and being vocal about being open – has helped the Foundation forge alliances with partners and sectors we couldn’t otherwise have reached.
Partnership working is possible without compromising your integrity. Early clarity on how any partnership aligns to our own strategy allowed us to qualify partnership opportunities that don’t lead to mission drift. We don’t always have to be in from the start – where we’re a junior or supporting partner in a collaboration, understanding where our knowledge, perspective, networks and role adds value helps us to put our ego to one side.
This article is an extract from Lloyds Bank Foundation's Lessons for Funder Practice 2018–2022.
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