The Gannochy Trust provides grants of around £5million a year to charities throughout Scotland, but has a particular focus on the Perth and Kinross local authority area, where the Trust is based.
The Trust has been a long-standing supporter of youth work. A few years ago, the Trust and Perth and Kinross Council recognised that, as the two largest local funding sources, we were both supporting year on year applications from the same youth work providers.
We became concerned that this model of funding encouraged competition rather than collaboration between local organisations, creating disincentives for them to share practice and support each other. Our short-term funding and separate application and reporting requirements were also adding to the administration involved.
So, we set about developing a new approach.
In 2019, the Trust and the Council launched the Perth and Kinross Strategic Youth Work Partnership. We worked together to design this, and we share the costs on a 50:50 split.
We saw the importance of sustaining universal youth work, which is a foundation stone of quality provision but has been on the decline nationally. We also wanted to encourage a more collaborative model of support that went beyond funding project delivery.
We invited bids to deliver place-based, universal provision in five localities that make up Perth and Kinross. We defined some outcomes that we hoped to achieve – for young people, youth organisations and the partnership as a whole – but were clear that we expected the service to be flexible and to work locally with partners to reflect the changing needs of communities. We fund core costs, recognising that field experts are best placed to meet local needs and prioritise their own spending requirements.
We started out with a three-year commitment. The first three years exceeded our expectations in terms of improved collaboration between the seven delivery partners who make up the Perthshire Youth Work Partnership. These organisations have worked together to deliver area-wide youth work events, a youth voice forum and larger training events for youth work staff – activities that would be considerably less viable without this collaboration.
It might be unusual for an independent charitable trust to fund in collaboration with a local authority – but it needn’t be.
Thriving and growing
An independent evaluation of the partnership has identified lots of benefits. These include a more cohesive approach to universal youth work delivery, with increased understanding of the challenges and services available across the area and better use and sharing of limited resources. The evaluation report also identified increased mutual trust and ability to respond to changes – which was especially important in enabling provision to continue during lockdown restrictions.
A major challenge for the youth work sector is the ability to match the capacity and skills of staff and volunteers to the highs and lows of when and where they are needed. Across the partnership, the ability to share skills and expertise in youth work themes has been invaluable in growing each of the partners’ breadth of offer. An informal “barter economy” has developed, with the ability to “borrow” staff from other localities. Skills, experience, resources and ideas are being freely exchanged. The impact of this is a much richer and broader youth work offer to every young person in Perth and Kinross.
As funders, for the same total amount that we used to spend through our separate annual funding streams, we’re now achieving greater reach to young people and more comprehensive geographical coverage – all delivered through a youth work sector that is thriving and growing, despite the effects of the pandemic.
The Perthshire Youth Work Partnership is not constituted as an entity in its own right, but the partners have collaborated to secure additional funding from other sources, with one organisation applying successfully on behalf of the whole partnership.
A bright future
It’s a testament to the successes of the partnership that we’ve now extended our funding by a further two years. There are lots of opportunities to take the impact of this work even further. The Gannochy Trust is currently working with our delivery partners to recruit and support young people to join a Gannochy Youth Grants Panel, who will make decisions on allocating funding towards aims and outcomes that we will co-produce with them. Meanwhile, the Perthshire Youth Work Partnership is being supported by the Cranfield Trust to develop a strategy for its longer-term sustainability and to build on its successes so far.
We think the approach we’ve developed in Perth and Kinross has potential to be replicated in other areas. As Catch the Light wrote in their evaluation report: “A bright and prosperous future for local youth work is possible by building on this model, that may also have a positive influence nationwide.”
It might be unusual for an independent charitable trust to fund in collaboration with a local authority – but it needn’t be.
After all, we’re both seeking the same outcomes in terms of improved services for local young people and a thriving third sector. And as we’ve discovered over the last three years, it’s not organisations that collaborate with each other – it’s people who do.
Any successful partnership depends on people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and make things happen. How we actually work together day to day is so much more important than the wording of a formal partnership agreement. The open and honest relationship we’ve established as funders has been just as important as the trust that has grown between the delivery partners we’re supporting.
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