Paying People Fairly: Building Trust and Equity (Podcast eps.)

Esther Foreman: Hello and welcome to The Social Change Nest Podcast. Today I’m excited to be joined by Rachel Smith from the University of Derby. And we’re going to be talking about a very niche aspect of our work and how it relates to wise impact, which is payment for involvement. Rachel is the creative director of makeshift, a program running in the surrounding areas of the university, working collaboratively with communities in the area to encourage creativity, connection and innovation. You partner this on a number of levels, which are going to go into in a minute, but also working with the community and taking part in these group meetings require a significant amount of time and commitment, and as members have been contributing experience and knowledge, we we started a discussion, didn’t we? To talk about how payment for involvement can be involved and integrated into the work. But before we get into that, welcome, Rachel. 

 
Rachel Smith: Thank you, Esther. Yeah, it’s lovely to be here. Yeah, I’m good. I’m here at the university. It’s a gorgeous, sunny day. Um, looking forward to diving into a conversation.

Esther Foreman: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you ended up there, and about your role and what you’re doing now?

Rachel Smith: Yeah, so I’m currently the creative director for makeshift. And just to be

really clear, um, we’re a very small program. We’re funded by Arts Council England, and we’re a kind of an action research project which is hosted within the university. So our remit is to work with the communities in Amber Valley in north east Derbyshire. So we work alongside people, groups, organisations to support them, to do what matters to them in the places that they live. And we then interface with the university as our kind of host organisation. And so we work with them to kind of function operationally. So Make/Shift isn’t constituted as a legal entity.

So we kind of we function as a team of three in quite an agile way. So we’re kind of like constantly sort of moving from the purpose of our work, which is to support communities. And then the challenges of and the opportunities of being hosted by an organisation like a university.

Esther Foreman: Can you tell us about what led you to social change nest in particular?

Rachel Smith: Yeah, so I actually started working with The Social Change Nest probably five or six years ago in my previous role. So I started with Make/Shiftabout three years ago to kind of set up Make/Shiftas a brand new project. But previously I’d been heading up the Community Neighborhoods team at the Barbican Centre in London, and in a very similar way to the kind of situation I find myself in now, was that I was working kind of in order to create community benefit and working on the ground in communities, but kind of being housed within quite a big organisation. So I guess with both that role and this role, the challenge has been, how do you work with communities when you’re working from inside a big institution? So I guess we were we were looking to think about how do we redistribute funding, resources, power and agency to communities. And I guess when you’re in a big institution, you’re coming up against a lot of different barriers of like actually how you’re going to do that. So I think anyone who’s worked inside, maybe a local authority or a university or a big organisation, will have experienced the sort of frustrations of having really good intentions and wanting to work in a specific way, but then hitting a lot of walls in terms of administrative and sort of bureaucratic challenges that mean it’s very, very difficult. So, yeah, I guess social change nests and using the Open Collective platform allowed us to start to think about investing in that middle piece of infrastructure that allows communities and institutions to kind of collaborate in a more equitable way, and kind of helps to create that interface between big things and small things, which is really, really challenging. You know, big institutions aren’t designed to work with communities, and communities aren’t set up to be able to negotiate the challenges of a big institution. So that piece in the middle is what I’m kind of personally super interested in. And I think that’s what Make/Shiftis doing in some ways. And then the technology and the infrastructure that and the kind of fiscal hosting role that social change nest plays helps us to start to play with that and think about, well, what might this look like if big things and small things or institutions and communities were able to collaborate and work together in a more equitable and kind of regenerative way. 

 
Esther Foreman: I think we could be talking for a very long time. Rachel. Where do we even start? I mean, you used a particular word earlier, maybe a dysfunctional relationship on many levels. And I’ve spent a long time in my career navigating that interface between really small community groups and large institutions. And there’s something about the systems that big institutions create that automatically means there’s a power dynamic. And, you know, that corporate body of an institution versus the unincorporated messiness and chaos of community life. They just don’t mix.

Rachel Smith: No, they’re just entirely incompatible. You know, at a systemic level. Yeah. I’ve had the privilege of working inside those systems, but doing work on the ground. So sort of slowly starting to see those things from the outside. Because I think what’s really interesting is that when you’re inside those systems and you’re kind of maybe the work that you’re doing is what that system is designed for. You don’t always notice the dysfunctionality or don’t notice those systems, but as soon as you’re sort of slightly on the edge of them or trying to do something that they’re not designed for, you know, suddenly they become really, really. Although it’s really frustrating. I’ve always really enjoyed that challenge of like being able to see that and then trying to think, how do we take responsibility for that? Because there are certain things that only big organisations can do, and to not be able to collaborate then creates, you know, a different kind of dysfunction. So that’s where I am in that messy middle ground.

Esther Foreman: Can I ask you a personal question? I think I’m wondering if our listeners would find it interesting is like, how do you personally pull yourself out of the system so you can see the fringes more clearly and you can navigate that because, you know, we’ve, I’ve worked like you worked inside systems and you can get sucked in. What are your personal rituals that you do? What calls you out to the edges of the system and keeps you there?

Rachel Smith: I guess I’ve always worked on programs that are funded and slightly ancillary to the core purpose of the organisation, so always thinking about community benefit. A lot of core functions of big institutions got themselves at the center, and they’re thinking about their own mission and purpose. And business plans are kind of like driving things. So I guess being alongside people and communities who who are then forced to interact, you just see it can be everything from someone who’s just trying to be paid to someone who’s just communicating with that organisation. Once you put yourself in the position of the of a person in a community, everything starts to become a lot clearer. And I think that’s what we’re doing with Make/Shiftis that we’re trying to put communities at the center of how we design our approach, and that obviously clashes massively with how an organisation would be operating normally. 

But I think that’s what I’m that’s what I’m thinking about a lot now at the moment is just like, at what point do people start behaving like the system?

Esther Foreman: Oh, I think from the beginning, unless you’ve done the work, unless you’ve done the work in the internal work to desystamitise yourself, you behave like the system and even that’s why I asked you how you pull yourself out

Rachel Smith: Yeah.

Esther Foreman: because I think we just do it even, you know, for me like a heavy practitioner in this, I still do it.

Rachel Smith: Yeah.

Esther Foreman: Yeah. And I someone needs to slap me and be like, “Come on, you’re behaving like the system. What are you doing?” And I’d be like, oh yeah, yeah, no, you’re right, you’re right.

Rachel Smith: And and that in itself is fascinating, isn’t it? That that’s such a hard thing to do. You know, we’ve set ourselves a challenge to work in that way and it’s it’s almost impossible. and so that in itself is a creative challenge that we find exhilarating, I guess, in some sort of weird way. because if we were housed in a smaller organisation there’d be no need for us to work with open collective there’d be no need for us to test out these sort of more innovative ways of working whereas because we are located within something that’s creating so many obvious challenges then it you know it forces us to be more creative and I think that’s there’s something really interesting about that that that kind of some of those constraints that we’re inside actually support us to be more innovative. because we have to otherwise it would be impossible to actually function.

Esther Foreman: It’s it’s innovation by default, isn’t it? Actually, it feels like a good time for you to tell us a bit more about the program and actually how you’ve been using and working through that program to make the changes in the community. 

Rachel Smith: we would say that the purpose of our work is to really think about how we put people at the heart of mobilising the creative power of their place. So with we think that there’s you know everyone’s creative and every place has its own kind of like creative genius but that obviously there are loads and loads of different reasons why that creative power can is contained or or limited.
 
So mainly what we’re we’re trying to do is work alongside people to create space for them to make, do, create, grow, nurture, look after whatever matters to them. and we do that in lots of different ways. we have a a peer learning program where we’re working with people in their place to sort of create space for their neighbours. So, we’re thinking about how we build the capabilities in places to then work alongside their neighbours. we have a microgrants program, so we’re distributing really small amounts of money to people to just try something and make something happen. so, yeah, we’re we’re just we’re we’re lucky that we’re an action research program. So, I guess the kind of core function is really for us to learn and for us to share what we’re learning. 

 
But yeah, the overall sort of remit for us is really to work in a very placebased way to build the governance infrastructures that allow decisions and resources to flow in a different way and and to explore how that then mobilises people’s creative potential.

Esther Foreman: is there a project that you love that’s really helped demonstrate done it’s done brilliant. Are you allowed to say are you allowed to have favourites? I don’t know. I’ve had a good rumage around the open collective page and some of the projects are absolutely brilliant. So you know my two favourite things creativity and culture combined with like governance. It’s like I’m there. I’m there. 

Rachel Smith: I guess my favourite thing is just, if you like you said if you go on the open collective page just the the ridiculous diversity of how creativity shows up for people.
 
Rachel Smith: and how for example, in my old world or in a kind of in a kind of classic sort of cultural context, you’ll have one program or one producer making decisions about one whole strand of work. And so, you’ve got one person’s perspective, one person’s experiences kind of really driving what culture and creativity looks like. Because that’s just the nature of things, isn’t it? If you’re making decisions, you’ve only got your own perspective to draw on.

Esther Foreman: Yeah

Rachel Smith: But when you let people do whatever they want and you put very few criteria around like what that is, suddenly you see this like just mind-boggling diversity and richness of of what creativity looks like to people. I just love it when we get the applications in for a program like that and you just you’re reading through things and you’re just like, “Wow, you know, these are things that there I would never have been able to come up with or imagine would have been things that might come up.” It just blows your mind a little bit in terms of if this way of working could be scaled up. Like imagine what a beautiful kind of rich ecosystem of culture and creativity could be created rather than the kind of more sort of moncultural cultural programs that get rolled out often.

Esther Foreman: I know.

Rachel Smith: So I think it’s that that’s that’s beautiful. And we’ve even stopped using words like creativity or in the kind of criteria. But then whatever happens that’s what’s what’s there. that’s what people want to share when you give people the opportunity to try something.

Esther Foreman: I can let you into a little secret. is that years and years ago in a very different life I used to work for the BBC and it’s a complete antithesis very you know and now we we look after
700 groups and at this level it’s art it’s creativity it’s it’s energy it’s like it’s just amazing you can’t you’ve got this amount of people doing stuff and they’re free unencumbered it just drives And you suddenly realise that the systems and the structures and the processes, the lies that we tell ourselves about how the world works stifle the things that make us human 

Rachel Smith: Yeah, very true.

Esther Foreman: and tell me it’s hard I mean I don’t want to go down the path of like you know let’s all break the rules but there’s something in there about you know working in intersection between the infrastructure and the chaos let’s just call it infrastructure and the chaos not that I’m calling community chaos, but like that kind of chaotic, wonderful, creative energy, the magic, the where the magic happens.

Esther Foreman: When we built Nest, we built Nest to hold that energy and protect the people that were were creative, whether it was entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, or community activists or whatever. It was like we will build, we vowed to build a system that would hold back that structural oppression in a way and let everyone be free and do the thing because we fundamentally believe that it’s that radical step that gives us makes us human and makes it progressive and fair and and equitable.

Rachel Smith: as someone who’s paid and who is in a privileged position to run a funded program, then like you say, your your role starts to become absorbing some of that risk, building infrastructures of trust when you’re facing towards the community and then weathering some of the challenges that might come but never passing those down, and that’s a really big role and it’s not an easy role, but it’s it’s also not that hard. And so I guess that would also be what I’d be trying to say to people is that that playing that role is so vital when you’re in a position of of sort of power.
 
Esther Foreman: Power. You have to hold it with a lot of integrity. And all these terms are kind of quite loaded, aren’t they? And they come in with like all the baggage, all the you know, colonial powers and capitalism and blah blah blah, you know, all the stuff that we know doesn’t necessarily create the healthiest working environment for creative flow. 

Rachel Smith: most of our job I think is more about redistributing and building different governance rather than involving people in our dysfunctional institution you know I guess there’s both those pieces of work have to happen don’t you like you want to involve people in what you’re doing and try and make your decisions better and make your organisation sort of less bad but then you also in a position to sort of  get money out and just acknowledge that this place that I’m in is never going to be the solution. So let’s build some different models out outside. So like trying to take responsibility for both those pieces of work rather than.

Esther Foreman: I mean you’re talking about the dilemma that anyone working in this space would always face it. It’s imperfect system. We are also imperfect. There’s a part of me maybe it’s because of my age. I don’t know if I just sort of feel like you you can only do your best 

Rachel Smith: Yeah. what I’m just nervous about at the moment is so many good people in really bad systems and  just not having the ability to see that they’re inside bad systems and that whatever they do unless they address that they’re going to create harm.

Esther Foreman: this is the stuff that is really hard, you know. It is really hard and you see that I see people like just stomping around communities and you’re like what what are you doing. we’re setting off a a Brent giving where I live and we we see stuff that’s just happened like some of the parts of the of the Brent community have been decimated like absolutely pulled aart over COVID then by lack of funding and you know we’ve got we’ve got a Somali community that lost all its elders to covid and the whole organisation, the whole community is just in deep trauma 

Rachel Smith: And I think we all want to be the hero, don’t we? Or we all want to feel like we’re doing something. Particularly now when things feel so urgent. I feel like it’s getting worse in some ways because people are so desperate to help. and so like trying to kind of work sensitively with those people who’ve got loads of energy, but they’re in the wrong, you know, maybe not in the right place to do what they think is possible from that place. And it’s kind of just gently kind of working out how to have those conversations without making people lose their kind energy because you don’t want to paraly you know you don’t want people to feel paralysed and not able to act but also unless you’re aware of the systems you’re in you can’t you can cause a huge amount of harm particularly in a really powerful organisation. You can start doing a lot of damage, can’t you? If you’re stomping around in the community without realising the power that you’re on.

so what we’re doing what we’re able to generate through that is what people are asking us to generate. So we’re not we’re not kind of going against what our remmit is or what the funder really wants to see. It’s just that it’s kind of like having that bravery to say well actually we think it will happen in this way and we can shoulder a bit of that risk. we’ve got a long-term ability to kind of like try something and then you like look it hap it still happens what you want is happening but in a different way so I think that’s also because sometimes people position that as quite a binary thing don’t they of like either or either we’ll let communities have the control or we’ll get what we want you know like and actually often you can have an and and scenario where you can build these infrastructures and you get a much richer much more diverse much more farreaching impact.

Esther Foreman: Yeah, 100%. You know, on that note, actually, I want to get into the payment for involvement side because it’s just such a technical thing that we do but it is crucial. and you know I I think that you know ultimately when we were commissioned to do the payment for involvement work by Lankelly Chase and Paul Hamlyn we had a learning community of 120 people everyone is struggling with this no one’s really talking about it and underneath it all is this kind of crucial notion of equitable ability to take part in something. What drove you towards looking at this for the program and ultimately partnering with us on your payment for involvement work? and I don’t maybe the listeners might need to know a bit more about what we mean by payment for involvement so Rachel I’m going to hand that batton to you

Rachel Smith: so I guess for us payment involvement maybe looks a little bit different from organisations or people working kind of more centrally within institutions. because I guess quite a lot of times you might be working kind of within say I worked in the university and was really part of building some governance for the university and I wanted to involve more different voices that would probably look like a more traditional payment involvement model but like you said l we’re still using payment for involvement and particularly in our first year we used that a lot because we were mainly kind of as we we set off trying to think about what Make/Shiftneeded to become we were mainly in like listening discovery mode.

So we were bringing people together having a lot of conversations looking at our theory of change looking at just connecting people and and allowing us to embed ourselves alongside what was already happening. And obviously that was really important to us but that required a lot of people’s time. and most of the people that we work alongside are either volunteer sort of community groups or freelancers or very small one, two, three person organisations who don’t have funding, don’t have any core funding. They’re not paid salaries. They’re not their time isn’t covered. And so in order for us to be able to bring those people together and for for that to be kind of an equitable relationship between us and them, we really wanted to make sure that their time was paid for. so so yeah, in the beginning we used sort of payment involvement for in quite an informal way like that. So it was kind of inviting people along to spend time with us, maybe convening around specific questions or specific work we offered payment for involvement even to come along to some of our networking and socials because we know that again you’re giving up half a day. Not everyone’s in a position to come along to something like that. Even if it adds value and you’re getting a lot from it, there all sorts of barriers that will prevent people from being able to come along. so I guess that was kind of like quite an informal way of us of us paying people. So that looked like having small pots set up on open collective and people being able to invoice quite small amounts of money for when they attended those sort of sessions. And then in the next phase where we were starting to build more governance sort of structures we’re starting to use payment for involvement to pay our community panel.

 
We have a panel of six people from across our district who come together over quite a long period of time to help us design and deliver our movers and shakers program. So they’ve been working together for about a year now and they spend time learning, co-designing and making decisions about how to kind of manage that fund and that’s currently about £30,000 pot that they sort of oversee and so again we pay their involvement in coming along to training sessions coming along to co-design sessions and then coming along and attending decision-making sessions with us. and though that is again entirely essential that’s a huge amount of investment for them in terms of time and we wanted to make sure that that was really valued as work and and paid as such. 

Esther Foreman: How did you decide to come up with a policy? Did you use our guide that we produced? people from the payment involvement community, they’ll be really into the technical aspects of this. Like how did you decide what went into the policy? Who was designing the policy? Who what went into it? how much you decide to pay people, you know, it’s all the the bits. And also and people should maybe for people that don’t know probably explain that there are also risks to people who are receiving payment for involvement and they’re on job seekers or they’re on on welfare and benefits. There’s a always a risk around that. So it’s also who shoulders that risk and who’s responsible for it. if you want to keep yourself aligned to your equitable purpose.
 
Rachel Smith: Yeah. we needed a lot of advice from yourselves at the beginning to sort of set those policies because obviously it can seem quite daunting to kind of set out and and design those from scratch. that’s the advantage of being part of a community of people who are doing this already with through open collective through social change nest and that we were able to look at what other people were doing. So we we looked at other people’s policies. We looked at other people’s ways of working. We were able to chat to a few different organisations about what they were doing and how they were designing their policies. And since we’ve been using Open Collective, we’ve chatted to loads of different people that you’ve put us in touch with as well. particularly people who are inside universities who are looking to try and test this sort of model out and getting advice about how to talk to the finance team about that, how to talk to different, you know, all the different teams within your organisation to kind of get them on board.
 

We have a our policies are quite simple. We wanted to be very transparent. We wanted to have a flat rate for things so that it was very clear that you know that everybody knew what everybody was getting and there wasn’t kind of it doesn’t fluctuate very much. It’s quite kind of set. and like you say there are a lot of challenges with people receiving money in certain contexts but we haven’t we haven’t come up against that so much so far in our payment for involvement sort of part of the work but we do come up against that in the micro grants and I think that’s where it’s so exciting for that piece of work in that sometimes when people want to take action but they don’t want to receive money they can do that through the platform because it’s not having to come into their bank account.

Esther Foreman: I think we we understand why we got we got the mechanism and we were really happy to help you and obviously we’ve been working with lots of people all over doing payment for involvement policies. I think it’s that that bit what difference has it made I suppose to to your work and and how people related to you related to the project? 

Rachel Smith: I mean for us it’s it’s all about ease and trust with the with community. So we it would be impossible for us to do this or almost impossible for us to do this through the university’s kind of financial setup. it’s very very difficult within large organisations to pay individuals. there aren’t a huge amount of mechanisms for for us to go through if we wanted to get money directly to an individual rather than to a group or a constituted sort of entity.

 
Rachel Smith: So I guess that’s a very practical thing that that creates a huge amount of challenge for us internally to kind of manage that if we were doing it. And also the amount of labour that would be involved in in doing that from our side and then shouldered by the people who were being paid would be enormous like very slow payments. the university’s got you know 4,000 people and the the processes are just incredibly slow. we can’t be agile and it’s quite laborious the kind of paperwork that anyone has to do in order to kind of be paid. So I think one of the one of the most incredible things about open collective is that it’s super easy and really really quick. You know people are getting paid really quickly and without very much instruction or very much help people can navigate and upload an expense or an invoice in a few steps. so like from our side that just in a very very black and white way some of that work just wouldn’t be possible without something like this platform.

Esther Foreman: It’s I mean, I know it sits on the policy though. I mean this is it. This is the both the policy and the mechanism. It’s a bit that that brings order to that messiness and the edges of the chaos that we were talking about, you know. and it’s it’s just brilliant the way you you guys have used it. And how many people have you do you think have received it now?

Rachel Smith: Since we started using the platforms, I think we started in back in 2023 and originally we went we were very like modest with how we began. So just to get the university used to using the platform like getting used to taking a little bit of a risk or a perceived risk from their side about kind of working in a different way. So I think in year one we’ve just moved over about I think we had about 3 or 4,000 pounds kind of on the platform and we were kind of distributing that mainly in very small amounts like 30-50 pounds you know just to pay for people a couple of hours here for meetings. but since we started we’ve distributed 185,000 pounds off the platform. We’ve got 95 people signed up using the platform and 36 different pots that are being managed directly by community groups.

 
So you know that’s absolutely massive for us in terms of being able to really position communities in a way that they’re able to kind of have autonomy and be trusted to manage small pots of money. So that some of those are like £300 and some of them you know some of them go up to like £10,000. It’s kind of like this huge range across you know what people are accessing. But but yeah, I mean that kind of community of people who are now using the platform, bumping into each other’s work and allowing us to redistribute in a really kind of easy, community friendly, equitable way such a big portion of our programming budget is really like transformative really for our work. Like it we couldn’t have you know we couldn’t work like that. we couldn’t do the particularly the kind of micro funding we just couldn’t do it in a way that was equitable if we didn’t have this platform  
 
Esther Foreman: Not to be cheeky, but what what are the rest of the areas using?

Rachel Smith: That’s the interesting thing with this program is that everyone’s housed in a very different organisation because they’re they’re set up as partnerships rather than as as kind of individual constituted organisations. Some people are you know set up within quite small community organisations so can function quite well, quite quickly but then more and more funders tend to be moving towards wanting that financial viability and and stability because they are big grants and small organisations are just really struggling right now. So there’s a sort of perceived risk now in terms of some of those bigger grants being held by organisations where perhaps that grant’s bigger than their annual turnover or you know it’s kind of creating a bit of jeopardy in their business models. So there are organisations that are being housed within housing associations, universities, within the NHS. So you know those are really challenging environments to be hosted in if you’re trying to work alongside communities.

 
I think that’s kind of fascinating that sort of the bridges and the interfaces that are going to be needed if more and more people want to work like that and we don’t want it to be sort of trickle down sort of model. We really want to be able to build that infrastructure that allows culture to sort of surge up from from from the community rather than sort of being trickled down from the larger organisations who have the infrastructures and the stability to play a really good role but need to also take accountability for all of the the ways of working which aren’t going to be adapted or suitable for for communities. So, there’s always like there’s a positive way of of the of all of these things working out, but I think it’s really just making sure that we are taking responsibility and holding ourselves to account. If you are doing that work from within an organization, you can’t pretend that you’re going to be able to do that without some cost to the community.

 
And I think that’s what I’m seeing now and nervous about is that obviously there’s more and more awareness of how important it is to be working with communities and how important it is to be building different governance infrastructures and you know see loads of citizens assemblies and lots of you know lots of different energy around sort of more citizen led decision- making but like not always an awareness that certain things aren’t possible or appropriate from certain places and you have to be able to take responsibility for what you can and cannot do and then put in place the right things if you are going to start to take action in that direction. So that’s the kind of area where I think it’s quite hard to talk about isn’t it because it’s quite invisible. It’s like the boring infrastructure.

Esther Foreman: the boring bits, the the boring wiring of stuff.

Rachel Smith: Yeah.

Esther Foreman: we’ve mentioned some big some big words here. It’s a lot of things around risk and accountability and you know understanding as a big organisation where you sit in terms of your responsibility for shouldering that.

Esther Foreman: Have you had any difficult conversations with the university around payment for involvement and actually what the risks are either way and are you allowed to talk about them?

Rachel Smith: Yeah, to be honest like the university have been really supportive because managing you know what we’re paying economies that we’re working with are also really unmanageable for them to be trying to kind of pay lots of tiny micro suppliers tiny amounts of money. They’re just not really set up to be able to manage that either. So actually the conversation was always quite a positive one with their teams because they they don’t know how to do that and they only really able to work in kind of one way and that way is is designed for like really big contractors and really big  tendering contracts and things.

And it’s very risk averse and it’s very intense and that’s you know designed for sort of like like a million pound contracts or those sort of things and so they they don’t know really how and they don’t normally as part of their day-to-day operations have to do that much of this kind of work. So it’s kind of unmanageable for them as well. So they were really positive and we we worked with our director of procurement and and commercial operations who was really really supportive actually and has has kind of allowed us to test it out and it’s it’s a win-win for everyone because they they don’t have to set up loads of new suppliers which is you know it’s just a really laborious kind of task in the way that it’s set up within a kind of context. I think anyone who’s ever worked with a university will be able to have a feeling of the pain involved in being paid or being set up to be paid. so they they know that that’s dysfunctional.

They just don’t really know how to have a different pathway. They don’t feel the kind of need to really redesign it. So there’s a perception that it’s something new. So there’s a sort of a familiar like getting familiar with it I guess both from a funder perspective and the university perspective of just proving that it’s working and and demonstrating to them what the benefits are and then noticing that there is no real risk. no one’s disappearing off with the money. And you know, there’s all sorts of Yeah.

Esther Foreman: I know that awful thing when someone disappears with 50 quid. I know it’s terrible. yeah we we see that and actually I think it’s people when we often work with the larger institutions they suddenly realise that we could just bypass the systems and structure they’ve got that holding everything back. Because the beauty of open collective, we love the tech so much. it’s radical transparency. There’s nowhere to hide.

Rachel Smith: No. Yeah.

Esther Foreman: So there’s literally the only thing that you exposes is your own finance team in an institution which might be laborious. So you know

Rachel Smith: Yeah. It’s a huge amount of wasted energy from our side and from their side, a huge amount of wasted energy to try and sort out these things from within a system that can’t really change. So, actually just to kind of like say just bypass that and be like this whole thing set up to be able to do this and that was also a really important thing actually in the early days. the transparency and the trust because obviously there’s also a lot of challenges around holding community money within a context of something like a university or a big institution there’s also a lot of distrust about what’s happening with that money so kind of that ability to kind of actually have a place where people can see what’s happening with quite large amounts of our budget is also really important in terms of trying to build that trust between us and the community, between the community and an organisation who isn’t wanting to squirrel that money away. They have no bad intentions really behind their aspiration to support this program. It’s just that sometimes operationally they’re getting in the way. But I think that ability to kind of have the budget somewhere where people can see

Esther Foreman: It’s radical. It’s so simple, but it’s so radical, you know.

Rachel Smith: Yeah.

Esther Foreman: And do do you think looking back now, said you’ve been going for a few years, do you think there’s anything you could have done differently or done better?

Rachel Smith: I think we’re always learning. I think that’s the beauty for us in terms of like because we’re we’re trying to work long term and we’re learning. you know we don’t really think about as as things could go wrong but 

Esther Foreman: You haven’t got no regrets. You’ve got no regrets.

Rachel Smith: we’re constantly shifting and changing how it’s working you know just kind of dancing with like what the best ways are. I feel like there’s such a lot of potential in the platform as well that we’re not tapping into particularly around income generation. So, we we’d really love to start playing around with what that looks like for communities to be able to also raise money into those pots and kind of use that that infrastructure because that’s a big big challenge in our place and I think for a lot of places where there isn’t a huge amount of infrastructure or like cultural or community infrastructure in that there’s a lot of very small people operating in isolation and they’re not able currently to really access the funding they need, and so really trying to think about well what does that mean if that’s not working if we’re if it’s not really working for us anymore to be kind of competing and and and accessing funding as individuals what would it mean to kind of come together and and start to look at what how we bring money in more collectively.

the platform would might allow us to sort of think more collectively about that and and bring in bigger pots of money or build sponsorships. So I think we’re kind of curious just about how we use that technology better.

Esther Foreman: Yeah, it’s highly, you know, potential for building out community chests and stuff like that is just brilliant. Just if you got any advice for anyone that’s thinking about paying participants for involvement or providing micro funding to support community ideas?

Rachel Smith: Um, what would my advice be? I think it would be you know you need to be noticing what’s happening and you need some trusted relationships that can show you what what’s really happening and like some proximity to it because otherwise you you can’t Yeah.

Esther Foreman: without being extractive. Do you need you need the feedback loops which is where the payment for involvement stuff comes in because you’re honoring. I mean there’s not much else you can do but other than honor people’s time and experience by giving them money because that’s what I get given when I work and give my time and experience you know 

Rachel Smith: There’s so much precedent now. there’s so many people doing this in all sorts of different places. So, it’s kind of reaching out and and talking to people who are doing it and learning alongside them. the precedent that you’ve already built up working with people all different scales of the system is evidence that it it can be done. And so don’t be disheartened. And if you come up against that person in the organisation who’s who says no, there’s loads of evidence that you can tap into to to kind of prove them wrong and and kind of like work with them in a in a way that benefits them and the work eventually. So yeah, don’t don’t take no for an answer would be my advice.

Esther Foreman: What a conversation. There’s so much to take away, from rethinking how we work with communities to exploring what fair payment and participation really mean in practice.

Thank you so much Rachel for sharing your insight and energy with us today, and to everyone listening, if you’re curious about how you can pay people fairly for their time and experience, you can have a look at the Social Change Agency’s Payment for Involvement handbook, which is a free, practical guide to create a fair and equitable payment for involvement policy. We’ve also included a payment for involvement toolkit which you can use to work with your local job centre to show them what paying people for involvement looks like.

Thank you for joining us and we’ll see you guys next time.