December 2008
Londoners and their health, 12 December
This meeting offered an opportunity to look at the factors behind London’s shocking health statistics, explore strategies to tackle health inequality and reflect on effective ways funders have found to promote health.
Alex Bax and Helen Davies, Greater London Authority, updated funders on the state of health inequality in London and the research and consultation being undertaken to develop a London-wide strategy.
Several case studies offered examples of health related projects:
• Health Advocacy for Refugees and Asylum Seekers Project: Margaret Fraites, Inclusion Adviser, Hounslow Primary Care Trust, and Rayah Feldman, Independent Evaluator, discussed this project to encourage refugees to register with GP practices.
• Maslaha, Islamic guidance on issues facing Muslims in the UK today: Raheel Mohammed, Research Associate, Young Foundation talked about health aspects of the Tower Hamlets pilot and smart ideas about getting information to Muslims of all ages and to local health care practitioners.
• Mental Health advocacy for parents, Nichola Harris, MIND in Croydon, talked about this innovative project and its evaluation by The King’s Fund.
An expert panel helped piece together some of the other agencies and services relevant to funders: London Health Commission, London Health Commission Community Development Forum, London Councils, The King’s Fund and the Young Foundation’s Health Launchpad.
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October 2008
Is it good for the voluntary and community sector when funders get together?
London Councils/London Funders seminar 24 October 2008
London Councils recently organised and hosted a half day gathering for representatives of boroughs and interested London Councils staff to hear about London Funders, meet staff and committee members and feed in their ideas about how London Funders could help them. The following report gives an overview of this session including discussion on how London Funders could better fulfil its commitment to helping boroughs support London’s VCS.
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Accountability and learning: developing monitoring and evaluation in the third sector
 Several organisations have recently turned their big guns on to the accountability requirements which funders expect of their grant recipients or contract partners. For example, New Philanthropy Capital has criticised heavy-handed public sector commissioners in “Turning the Tables”.
Charities Evaluation Services (CES) recently undertook the biggest UK research study to date on monitoring and evaluation demands and practice in the third sector, involving over 100 funders and commissioners as well as more than 700 voluntary organisations.
The sector has improved rapidly in recent years in the use of evaluation but much of the message from this study, led by Dr Jean Ellis, is one of organisations struggling with the basics of evaluation and often disproportionate requirements from funders.
This meeting examined a number of questions including should funders do more to tailor their requirements to an appropriate scale for the size of work funded? If reporting is mainly about compliance, is everything asked for really necessary? Can evaluation be structured more to help the funded organisation learn and grow?
Download minutes of this meeting
Download a copy of Jean's Presentation
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Funding faith communities
 Understanding, respect and rights – London Funders’ members meeting on 13 October 2008 finished with these three words, an apt summary of much that had been said. Between 30 and 40 funders took part and the intensity of some of the discussion made it plain that we were covering a topic that presented both interest and challenge. Feedback was good and our excellent plenary speakers especially stimulated much thought: these were Professor Tariq Ramadan (Erasmus University, Netherlands and St Antony’s College Oxford), David Rayner (Communities and Local Government), Monica Needs (London Borough of Barking and Dagenham) and Jim McManus (Barking and Dagenham Primary Care Trust).
Discussion at various stages of the afternoon covered:
- interfaith work and what impact interfaith dialogue is now also having on collaborative social action
- the value of “faith literacy” in a context of more faith diversity (as well as the countervailing secularisation of British society)
- the new government Faith in Action Fund and various useful publications
- practical work in one borough reaching people through faith communities to tackle health issues and inequalities
- capacity issues in faith groups
- whether faith groups typically fail the “equality test”
- why some funders have a bias against supporting faith communities
Professor Ramadan focused on the building of trust between communities in a context of diversity and divergence of ideas – a common project can bring people together in trusting relationships that rise above doctrinal and other differences. All the speakers reminded us how much faith groups can achieve in community-building and direct service provision – often way beyond their apparent capacity. Discussion explored some of the complexities of relationships between local groups and government (local and national) and the paradox that money can be a barrier for some groups, not what brings them to the table.
Several of the participants have told us that they will do something different as a result of the meeting – eg reviewing how faith policy affects the number and quality of applications they receive; checking whether unintentionally some of their resources are not reaching people on faith grounds; and engaging with faith forums to ensure they have the widest possible range of links to other groups. Participants enjoyed the small groups sessions (the knowledge cafes) since these allowed in-depth discussion and a chance to deepen links with other funders.
Full report
Presentations
David Rayner
Monica Needs and Jim McManus
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September 2008
Presentation to Mazars' not for profit clients
 On the 22 September 2008 London Funders were inviited to showcase London Funders services and achievements at a presentation for Mazars' not for profit clients (Mazars is an Integrated, Independent and International firm, specialising in audit, accounting, tax and advisory services.)
Over 90 organisations registered for this event from a wide range of charities and not for profit's including Advice UK, SANE, The Peabody Trust and Age Concern.
Download a copy of our presentation
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May 2008
What would make London better for young people?
A meeting for London's funders and investors
Tuesday 20 May at City Hall.
This meeting on 20 May proved to be London Funders’ biggest meeting yet, with a very high proportion of members attending.
Our plenary speakers were Jennifer Izekor, Director of Children and Learners, Government Office for London, Nick Wilkie, Chief Executive of London Youth and a group of four young people who are part of the Greater London Authority’s Peer Outreach Team. Jennifer talked us through government policies and programmes for London and shared her commitment that a key factor in improving young people’s lives will be to tackle negative stereotypes about young people. Nick asked whether youth clubs are fit for purpose and enlisted the support of funders in framing the concepts and the measures that will help to identify their value to communities. The Peer Outreach Team members talked about their commitment to improving youth participation in planning and service provision and gave some memorable examples from their own work in helping other young people's voices and views to be heard.
Four workshops helped participants explore specific issues in smaller groups and as ever we tried to make sure there was plenty of networking time. We were grateful to the GLA for providing us with the venue and for CCLA Investment Management for help towards refreshment costs and for ensuring the highest ever percentage of evaluation forms returned to us by donating an IPod Nano was won by Billy Dann of the Church Urban Fund.
Request a copy of the presentation given by Jennifer Izekor, Director of Children and Learners, Government Office for London
Download the full meeting report.
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Resources for work with young people in London - The funding jigsaw
We are pleased to share with you a publication compiled by members of London funders to bring together in one place information on sources of funding for work by and with young people in London.
If you find it useful, please share it more widely. The report grew from our May meeting on funding work by and for young people in London. To help us make sense of current funding opportunities, including some new resources, as we prepared for the meeting, London Funders’ members contributed information on their programmes which we combined into a simple summary document, now expanded into a more comprehensive picture as many members told us that they thought this would be a useful resource.
Download the “funding jigsaw” as a PDF.
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April 2008
Supported Volunteering
A briefing for London Funders by Greater London Volunteering
Wednesday, 16 April 2008 at London Funders
Supported volunteering provides some extra assistance to people wanting to get into mainstream volunteering opportunities but with barriers to tackle – for example homelessness issues, physical disabilities, mental health issues, learning disabilities, sensory impairments or drug/alcohol dependencies. With funding from Capacitybuilders, Greater London Volunteering (GLV) has researched the impact on individual volunteers and the services in which they work.
This research was published in early April and disseminated to members, associates and friends of London Funders on 16 April at a breakfast briefing by a panel of researchers and practitioners led by Chris Freed - GLV Development Worker. Presentation and discussion at the briefing reviewed the value of supported volunteering to the volunteers and the organisations in which they work; the research had useful insights into the best means by which support can be offered to both volunteer and agency – often most effectively by borough volunteer centres .
Download research report
Download a copy of the presentation
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March 2008
Working Money Harder
We heard from funders and one project about the experience of managing complex funding, Malcolm Hayday of Charity Bank and talked from experience about helping groups transform ideas into reality, thinking afresh about financial support, maximising the use of assets and forming new partnerships with different funders and different sectors. He helped participants think about how care in resourcing projects and services can open up new ways of working, new combinations of funding, allow bigger thinking, different thinking and new types of collaboration, engagement and leverage.
We looked at a big voluntary sector project, the development of Ealing Resource Centre, from the viewpoint of its manager Knox Daniel; then with the help of Sandra Jones of the London Borough of Lewisham drilled down to ward level to look at the piloting of involvement of local people in decision-making on grants allocation.
Andrew Robinson of CCLA set the scene and Hilary Norman, Office of the Third Sector shared some of her department’s thinking about funding and social investment.
David Gold (A Glimmer of Hope) reflected back his comments on what he heard and challenged funders to think more constructively: his comments stimulated a lot fo discussion, which ran over into a final networking lunch.
Presentations:
Click here to download the full report of the meeting
Quality: what to measure, how to verify, who to believe
The Good Practice in Grantmaking and Voluntary Sector Infrastructure Development groups
held a joint meeting on quality standards on 18 March and heard presentations from Sam Matthews, Director of Services at Charities Evaluation Services on the whole range of different performance measurement systems, and from Andrea Allez, Performance Improvement Manager at the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action on NAVCA’s Quality Award.
Presentations & handouts:
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February 2008
"Answering BIG Questions: impacts and lessons learned from 12 years of research”
London Funders February policy briefing by the Big Lottery Fund
On 28 February, London Funders’ members gathered for an informal breakfast update by Steve Browning, Evaluation and Research Analyst at the Big Lottery Fund. Steve talked about recent work to synthesise all the research undertaken by the Fund over the last 12 years and the learning they had gleaned from that to inform future grantmaking programmes and their grantmaking practice. The resulting discussion looked in some depth at the role of research and its value for grantmakers.
Download a copy of the presentation.
Download the minutes of this meeting.
Copies of the publication were mailed to all members in February, and can also be downloaded from the Big Lottery Fund website.
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