Rethinking Funding: Why Put Your Trust in Place-Based Groups

Andy Crosbie: The focus isn’t on distributing money. The focus is what grows from the money that you’ve spent. The work that we are doing is building social infrastructure. It’s building networks of relationships. It’s building these really tangible, neighbourly relationships, but they’re not things that you can target. So we do these things that draw people in and we fund people’s time so that they can really get stuck in. And all of this beautiful stuff blossoms out of it. But it’s indirect, it’s unpredictable, it’s often not measurable, and because of that, it doesn’t fit with existing funding structures.

Rufaro: Hello everyone and welcome to the Social Change Pod. In today’s episode, we’re exploring why place-based community-led work might be better suited to solving complex challenges than traditional top-down approaches and what it might look like to fund that work in a way that truly supports long-term meaningful change. I’m Rufaro, the development lead here at The Social Change Nest. And in today’s episode, I’m joined by Andy Crosby and Rich Gibbons from Gateshead Community Bridge Builders, alongside Elijah Williams from Brent Giving. These are two organisations working in different parts of the country, both drawing on lived experience and local knowledge to better understand and respond to what’s actually happening in their own communities and involving local people more directly in how decisions are made, where the funding goes. So thank you all for joining me today. How are we all doing? So the reason why we are having this interesting conversation in part is because obviously we’re very big champions and supporters of your work.

Elijah: Yeah. Fine, thank you.

Rufaro: So Gateshead Community Bridge Builders works closely with different communities across Gateshead through their unique Bridge Builder model, which draws on lived experience to support and respond to local needs. Tied to that, Brent Giving has recently launched its first resident-led participatory grant-making program aimed at supporting local voices. So maybe to start off, and I will point this maybe to you, Elijah. Both of your organisations essentially focus on place-based work. For Brent Giving, could you tell us a bit about what that looks like in practice for you daily and what the long-term aim is?

Elijah: So in terms of Brent giving, of course, we’re based in the borough of Brent and our main goal, would you say, is to alleviate poverty in the community and also capacity building within the community as well. So with the PGM or the participatory grant making model that we use is a resident led approach where we recruit and train local residents in the area. And we train them on how to read an application, how to assess a budget, even how to work as a team and for them to get a better understanding of what is actually happening in the borough where they can get the data from, how they can assess it and then how they can almost use that for their own work as well, if they are doing work in the borough. And then they read the applications when our grant is open, they shortlist them together and they also vote at the end on who gets funding and everything is all done democratically. We use a software system where everybody votes. Everyone’s vote is one point and we take the averages and then those successful applications go on to the next round. 

But day to day, that looks like us going into the community, going into the centres. There’s already a lot of people already doing a lot of work in the community, but their stories may not be told or they might need more assistance in getting the work that they’re doing out to the wider public. So it’s about meeting them, giving them advice, helping them and then promoting them as well at the same time. So that’s what we started to do. But pretty much for our first year, we were starting from scratch, which I’m sure Rich and Andy may know about, year one, month one. So now that we’re in our year two, we can actually fully go out there and do the other side, which is the capacity building part of it. We’ve done the grant, well, we’ve done all the governance and setting up. And we went out there and we opened our grant fund and it was fully funded. But now it’s about year two actually doing the capacity building along with doing our second round of grants.

Rufaro: No, that sounds great. Thank you so much for sharing. I guess maybe, obviously, pointed now to Rich and Andy, who are more mature in their journey. It would be interesting to hear from you what, you know, place-based work looks like for you and what that looks like daily.

Andy Crosbie: Yeah. So in terms of the long-term shifting decision-making to local communities is absolutely the long-term goal. So our work began in partnership with the Lankelly Chase Foundation. So we’ve been working with them, funded by them for six years. And how that’s worked is the first year and a half was a slow and foundational process as Elijah’s been talking about. Yes, we feel your pain about that setting up stuff, but about essentially building a team that Lankelly had the confidence in who were able to make financial decisions locally. 

It’s interesting hearing about Brent Giving and the PGM work that you’re doing. For us, we very early decided that we didn’t want to be dealing with applications. So we had to think about a different way to build a local decision-making infrastructure. So our team, the Gateshead community bridge builder team is made up of people who are drawn from different marginalised local communities of Gateshead. And we come together at least every fortnight. The process has been drawing on the relationships that are held within the community to surface what matters to those communities. And from those conversations, developing ideas led by the communities about what the communities would want and need, what would benefit them, and then having collective decisions about what it would take to make that happen. And then we’ve got this pot of funding that we can draw on to make those things happen. So that the team of community bridge builders are the decision-making team drawn from the different communities. And they’re then also the spearhead about getting the thing started in the communities once a decision has been made. So that’s how we’ve been building local community led decision making for the past six years.

Rich Gibbons: Yeah, well just add some additional context onto that. So we’ve always had a devolved decision-making board essentially, but the version that we had at the beginning, Andy’s referenced to there, was very, very different to what we’ve got now. So up and down the country, the team that we initially had would look like many decision-making teams that you would see. It was predominantly white, was predominantly middle-class, was predominantly 40-plus, and predominantly people that were in existing decision-making roles in their own organisations, CEOs, leaders, etc. And we found it very, very difficult to think outside the box with that group, didn’t we? A lot of the ideas were reflected through the funnel of their existing role in their existing organisation, which obviously has all the current traditional architecture, things that they do day in, day out, and we know that are often broken. It also didn’t represent the communities that we see when we you know, rub shoulders with people on the streets. That’s a very much eclectic mix of different backgrounds and the group that we had wasn’t reflective of that. 

So Andy and I knew that that had to change and that also reinforced the decision to go down the route of the bridge builders. And when we recruited for bridge builders, we didn’t recruit for sort of traditional operational kind of competencies that you would usually be looking to showcase at a normal interview. We didn’t actually do a normal interview process at all, but that’s a different conversation. Instead, we’d cast the net quite wide to look for people that were already advocating on behalf of their communities, already there as support for people, whether they needed help to fill in a form or had a housing problem and they went to this person in their community because they knew that they would help people. But they were doing those rules, holding those rules in addition to having your nine to five job, having a family, know, trying to live your life and pay the bills and everything. 

And part of being a bridge builder was to, Elijah, you spoke about capacity being a really important part of what Brent Giving are doing. It’s freeing up that capacity to create this sort of net of bridge builders that are already walking alongside communities because they’re part of their communities, you know, they have the same challenges, the same day to day things that they are dealing with. And so we brought in people from a range of different backgrounds. You know, people that were asylum seekers and had gotten their status and now working in the UK. One of the bridge builders is deaf and has always volunteered and worked with the deaf community, a whole range of different folk. And as Andy highlighted, they’ve basically been freed up to do the same sort of things that they were already doing beforehand. But now there is a support infrastructure around that. We largely get out of the way, you know, and create the space for them to do the exploration, but can also be here to think through certain things that they are seeing and hearing, act as a sounding board, so I have a research background so we can look at unpacking some of the more difficult to see things through the things that they are learning from within their communities. 

And the day-to-day really looks like a lot of that, a lot of exploration, a lot of relationship building, and a lot of deep listening and trying to understand people from where they are standing themselves. And through those mechanisms, creating this sort of partnership with communities where they have the autonomy to build a project or a piece of work that the bridge builders, through our pot of funding, can bring alive, help to support and manifest. So yeah, the day to day is very much that slow, gradual, take it slow, let it grow step by step phase. And that’s been going on for years now.

Rufaro: That sounds amazing. I mean, it sounds like a lot of work, but work that’s very impactful. And I think one of the things I wanted to tie into your work is centered deeply on lived experience, because there’s a lot of people in the community that as you said, just now, Rich have already walked that journey or have lived through certain experience that can help someone else. For all of you, is this what led you to center it on lived experience to be able to touch more people that have kind of gone through that journey to help someone else? And how does it help you shape the way you understand and respond to issues within your community compared to someone else who’s maybe looking at this from the outside?

Andy Crosbie: Yeah, it’s interesting. We’ve only recently started to use the language of lived experience, but that’s absolutely always been central. Recently we’ve started reaching for descriptors like lived experience leadership or lived experience decision making. One of the keys around this is something that Rich has touched on already, which is when we had the first iteration of the group before it was called the Gateshead Community Bridge Builders, it was a group largely built around professional experience. And so when we were going through the process together, when we were talking about what Gateshead needed. Everybody’s input was framed around their professional role, their professional headspace. And when we suddenly had this freedom with this pot of money to do literally whatever we could dream up. So as Richard’s described, we knew that we needed to shift who was in that group, who was making the decisions. And so we went looking for people, as Richard said, from local communities, in some cases with no professional experience at all. 

When you asked the question, the first thing that jumped into my head was something from our recruitment process. One of our amazing bridge builders, Zara, said to us after the process or partway through the process, if you’d asked me for a CV, I wouldn’t have applied because she had not had a paid role before becoming a bridge builder. And I think Rich would agree with me. Zara was the person who just leapt off the starting line. Like she was the most ready to go. But we’ve always been trying to manage this tension between lived experience and professional experience. I really think that the language of lived experience decision-making is really important because there’s still very much a tendency to view decision-making, particularly decision-making about money, as something that requires professional experience, professional expertise.

Rufaro: I just wanted to I guess tied to that is it’s very interesting, I guess, to, you know, all of our listeners out there that even whether it’s within the group setting or with the funders themselves, there’s a lot of value in lived experience, even if it’s not from a professional sense in the case of what you’ve just explained now with Zara.

Andy Crosbie: Yeah, 100%.

Yeah, having been doing this work for a number of years, like the stories I tell over and over again, but here’s one of them and it’s a really important one. We’re having a community event in the first couple of years of this work and we were just trying to talk to local people about what they might like to do in their community. And so we were saying, yeah, we’ve got this funding available. So if you were to make a decision about what we would do locally, what would it be? And there was this person who we asked that question to and he said, what are you asking me for? I’m not the sort of person who should be making decisions. So we said, well, who should be making decisions? Oh, the council, the council should be making those decisions. What do you think about the decisions the council makes? Oh, they’re terrible. They never do anything to benefit me. 

One of the things I hear in these conversations is this idea that people with lived experience make better decisions. And that may be true. That may not be true. I don’t know. I don’t know the data on it. But one of the things that we absolutely see is that decision-making is often seen to be this like elite role. You have to have decades of professional experience to be a decision maker. And that has been internalised by so many people in our communities that they are not the sort of person who should be making decisions. A huge part of our work has been about building people’s confidence that they deserve to be in this space. There is something just centrally vital about creating spaces that value people’s lived experience and that support them to take that into decision making because it shifts the way decisions get made. And it helps break down some of those stratified social barriers that people like me should not be making a decision, which is something I just don’t believe, but is, I think that’s an implicit message that people get from existing cultures and existing structures.

Rufaro: Yeah, I’m curious to hear then, I guess, because obviously you’ve done this for such a long time and been so successful. Elijah, where do you see this lived experience kind of feeding into Brent, especially since you’re still at the beginning of that journey, but you have just gone through your first funding round. Where does that tie into those with lived experience being able to speak more on the situations they’re facing compared to, say, an outsider?

Elijah: Yeah, so I agree with what you’re saying, Andy. think when you give people a chance, you’ll be surprised at how far or how wide they can really go. Look, I’ve said this many times in many meetings. The main reason why people or decision makers, wherever that they may be, whichever organisations that they may come from, may be a bit weary or bit concerned when you say, okay, we want the residents to make their decisions is plain and simple is because they haven’t been trained. If we’re talking about local authority, you haven’t trained them. So because you know you haven’t trained them, of course you’re going to be worried. I wouldn’t let somebody drive me in a car if I know that they haven’t had the training or they haven’t passed their exam. Of course I wouldn’t do that. So it’s not so much people can’t necessarily do it. It’s just that, like, where are the opportunities to even learn to do this? And if you are in a position that can offer that training and you haven’t when an organisation like Gateshead, like Brent Giving come and say, look, we want the people to make their decisions or have empowering. Of course you’re going to be nervous about it because they’re going to be thinking, we know that we haven’t trained them. Are they able to make these type of decisions? But just like with anyone, whoever’s making the decisions today, when they first started, they were brand new in the role. 

The same can be applied to any resident that is willing to learn and want to take part. And also like just to piggyback off what Andy was saying is that in my opinion, I don’t think the gap is that wide. You know, I think it’s a very small gap in terms of being someone that’s been doing it for quite a few times. For us, looking at applications was actually quite important because in terms of training and for them to get used to seeing applications and seeing like how people are replying, we looked at that part of it as pretty good practice. So say for our first round, for example, we got like 60 applications. And I remember we had 12 people on the panel at that time. And I said, like, if you read all 60 of these applications, which is what you’re going to do, I guarantee you’re going to be further ahead than most people. So you’re reading 60, grading them, shortlisting them, taking votes on them. You’re going to be way ahead than most people, even if they’ve been in the role for two, three years, because they may not even see that many applications. And then you could actually, to a certain level, even start consulting or even giving advice for the local people in their community. So if they know somebody that is writing an application, they’re able to say, you know what, I’ve gone through the Brent Giving program. I can definitely help you on how to actually do that application. I’ve seen some good ones. I’ve seen some not so good ones. And I can tell you what people tend to like to hear or like to see because I was one of them as well. I was on a panel myself. And even though we’ve just done our first year,

We have seen people now have confidence to actually apply for funding or even start changing their job roles or maybe apply for a job which they would never have applied for before. But because they’ve gone through and there’s actually more of a community and also as well, there’s someone there to hold their hand during the process. So even if someone does apply for a job and they don’t get it, it’s they’re not just by themselves. They can tell us, we can say, okay, let’s have a look at the application. How did you apply? Maybe there’s other opportunities that we know of and so on and so forth.

Rufaro:  It sounds like there’s a strong sense of empowerment as well that the community themselves receives through you, you know, working with you and being part of whether it’s Brent or connecting with Gateshead Community Bridge Builders as well. Speaking of that empowerment, what role do you feel like the social change nest has played in supporting your work to be able to deliver what it is you do? And how has this relationship between us changed? Do you feel like it’s changed over the years?

Rich Gibbons: So initially when we first started this work the financial side of everything was held by the Lankelly Chase Foundation so they would they would do the grant fund you know we would say what we were looking to do and they would create the grant agreement and and it would go to where we needed to go to etc which was good but a few years ago now, you know, the relationship with Lankelly Chase in terms of how that work has changed and altered and instead we put our devolved pot of funding into the social change nest and the wonderful Harkiran was our caseworker and support there and she’s been fantastic and really what it allowed us to do was make the strategic choice to not incorporate. So the Gateshead Community Bridge Builders is not an organisation. We are an unincorporated entity. And I say strategic because we did choose to do that primarily because we didn’t want to create a new entity within the sector that was then hosting all of the rules. Everyone was employed by that organisation and in competition technically with all of the other organisations in the sector because obviously the charity sector, although it might sound mental to people on the outside, it is a competitive landscape. So yeah.

We were able to stay unincorporated and all of the roles within our organisation are hosted in a series of different grassroots organisations within Gateshead. So we are part of the sector in many different ways and being with the Social Change Nest has given us more autonomy to make those kinds of decisions. Andy and I were just talking about this earlier as well, weren’t we? Through a series of different reasons, one of our bridge builders needed to go to self-employment for a period of time if we were still with Lankelly chase that would have probably been a more convoluted and difficult thing to arrange. But now we’ve had the freedom to make that choice. It’s made it much more easy for that individual. And it was a pretty straightforward process. So in terms of what we have been able to do, I think it’s opened up options. It’s opened up choices, decisions that we can make and it’s all been relatively smooth sailing.

Rufaro: It’s really nice to know that the relationship we’ve built with you has been beneficial, not just to yourselves, but as well to the communities that you impact. On your end, Elijah, how do you feel the role that social change nest plays in terms of being able to support your work? How do you feel we’ve played a part in what you do?

Elijah: Huge part, like major part. mean, from the beginning, like, Brent Giving was originally started by the social change nest founder Esther Foreman, who’s a resident of Brent. And so having social change nest that’s actually there, it helped. It made I would definitely say the first six months a lot easier because in terms of having someone to deal with the finances or even HR and so many of the other admin stuff, I like to call it, they definitely helped there. But also as well when it actually did come to the grant making process, we were actually able to get the funds out a lot quicker. I remember being in a meeting, they asked like, how quickly can you get funds out? And I said, about two weeks. And they nearly fell off their chair because they were expecting us to say six months. That’s because it was able to go through like open collective and stuff. Even that I learned from there that even just someone needs help or someone needs assistance, for example, we can get that out to them immediately. Sometimes within a few days, it’s like a game changer, to be honest with you. I don’t think there’s a lot of grant making that actually runs like that. It’s very slow, like methodical. One delay could set a project back a couple months and having the team there whenever we do need them is really good. They’ve helped us writing our job descriptions when we’ve been hiring. I piggyback off like the expertise of the team. Whenever we have hired somebody, they’ve been part of the interview process. They’ve been part of interview team. It’s good because especially when it was just me as the only member of staff, I mean, like there’s like 20 odd people that was there. And being in London as well, it was a lot easier. I was able to go to the office a couple of times and, you know, just be with the staff members because there’s always a desk available. So that was really helpful because it can get lonely. You need someone to bounce off some ideas.

Rufaro: No, thank you for that. And I can understand the journey as I think Andy mentioned in the beginning, that year one when you’ve just kind of come up and I think we come across a lot of unincorporated groups in this work where it’s just one person with an amazing idea, but it needs to grow from somewhere. Now, I suppose tied to that specifically for Andy and Rich, your website talks a lot about collaborating to build power and capacity at the heart of communities.

Now the topic of funding is quite a pivotal point in terms of, you know, this type of place-based community-led type of work. In your case, how does funding fit into that and would it be possible for you to exist without it?

Andy Crosbie: There are so many ways to take the answer to this question as Richard’s raising his eyebrows at me. As I said, our work is centered around lived experience decision-making and in our experience, money is a double-edged sword. A bunch of people making a collective decision where there is money on the table, it gets messier than the money not being there. And sometimes the money can get in the way and we’ve got a whole bunch of stories about that. So that’s a reality which I want to state and then put to one side because for me, the main issue about funding, the main importance of funding is that funding provides capacity. So the decision that we made when we dreamt up this Bridge Builder role is that we were going to create paid roles for community members. We were going to not just pay people for the time on an ad hoc basis, but give them a salaried time to dig into this work, to dig into the reality of their community, what the community wants and needs, as I’ve said, and also to dig into the work of changing systems.

What on earth does that mean? If we didn’t have funding, we wouldn’t have been able to provide the capacity to people that we were able to, which just meant the work wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as it did. So for me, funding people’s capacity is an absolute for this if you’re going to take the work seriously.

Rich Gibbons: Yeah, I think the tagline that you’ve obviously gotten from the website, it’s funny because sometimes describing what the work that you do is, you can go off in lots of blind alleys and you can get mixed up because it can get quite messy. And so one of the things that we did, we thought, how can we succinctly, neatly say in like a line or two what this work is about? And that was to build power and capacity at the heart of communities. And I’d also add onto that to bring more people into decision-making spaces as well, which is an integral part of what we do.

But one of the things that we actually found was actually the traditional world doesn’t really want just anyone to enter decision-making spaces. So there’s not really many levers for people to pull as a decision. I mean, you put your eggs in a box once every five years, but generally speaking, to be really at the heart of the types of decisions that are moving things that matter in your life. There’s not a big wide varied invitation list for those types of spaces. We found that we’ve had to create those spaces ourselves. And it sounds like that’s obviously what you guys are doing as well, Elijah, in terms of people getting so much experience at looking at the applications and things like that. So yeah, a lot of the work that we’ve done, might on the surface of it look like a project or some type of service or some type of initiative, but actually that’s just the external part. The bit that’s important is the journey that people go on and the ripples that come from that and the opportunities that people are given to be part of something that’s broader than that immediate bubble of stuff that we usually have going on in our lives, you know, our family and things like that, be part of something else with other people. And once you’ve gotten that opportunity, you don’t really need funding to take that anywhere else, not necessarily, not always, because you don’t know where people might take things themselves. I mentioned the ripple effect. We’ve got so many people that have connected to this work in one way or another and have maybe sort of came in and out of doing certain things with the Gateshead Community Bridge Builders. But because of the experiences that they’ve had working with bridge builders or working in some of the community projects, they’ve then gone on and made different types of choices in other parts of their lives and started things themselves. So that ripple, you know, you can measure it. It’s harder to measure than normal projects, but it’s there. And I see it quite often when I bump into people that I might not have seen for a year that are part of this work.

Rich Gibbons: And they say, they’re not telling me about what they’ve been doing and how the project that we did together inspired them to take this extra step. But yeah, you can totally get things done in a real tangible sense with little or no funding. But as Andy highlighted before, if you want, we, and we do want to pay people a meaningful salary to hold this process and really give it the place work, the attention that it requires and the time it requires. And that would be very difficult to do without paying for it.

Rufaro: That’s a very, very insightful view on it. In your case, Elijah, I know Andy’s shared the view that money can be a double-edged sword, depending on the context. For brent giving, on your website, you talk about, you know, a lot of for the community from the community. Where does funding fit into that, and would you exist without the funding?

Elijah: I agree. It can be double edged. just, think it’s more dangerous if it’s deployed in the wrong way. So in terms of, let’s say participatory grant making, that term within itself, when I first started my work, I learned that that’s almost like a tainted phrase because it had been tried before with the local authority and there was mixed views on how they did it. So the word participatory, I had to drop it. I stopped using it. You know, that’s why I just say we’re resident led grant making because a lot of people still had a lot of trigger towards that word participatory because that was the word that was pushed at the time that we did something different. It’s called participatory and it could have been done better. Let’s just say. So in terms of the way that the funding is deployed, it can definitely be double edged.

Even one of the things that we wanted to do at Brent Giving is that we wanted to make sure that every year the panel changes. So for the first year we had 12, even if we have another 12, it would be a brand new 12. And what Rich was saying about the ripple effect, I say the same thing as well, is that it creates that ripple effect there, but I don’t want the ripple to stop, to stop like whatever caused the ripple in the beginning. I want that to continue because then it gets wider and wider like. Like we’ve got 12 panel members this time. Once they pass it, like we call them ambassadors, but I like how you call them bridge builders. That’s really nice. And so they’re, they’re getting out into the community. So say we’ve got 12 this year, we have another 12 next year. That’s 24, another one that’s 36. And then they are also impacting other people after you got like five, six, seven years of that, like you’ve got like hundreds of people that have really been affected. But that should not stop because there’s new generations that are coming up, you know, lot of work needs to be done. There’s a lot of gray areas, like there’s a lot of groups of people that are still not getting affected or touched or approached or are getting involved in with it. And that’s why the work still needs to continue. And funding is a part of that. I’m very much for giving a living wage, you know, in London, it’s the London living wage. I’m all for that because we are asking people in the community to give up their time, their expertise, their knowledge. And like we were talking about earlier, they have knowledge, they have expertise. It may not have been broadcasted or presented but it’s there. So just like anyone else would expect to be compensated for their skills and expertise and for their experience. They should also have the same as well.

I’m a big fan of volunteering. I’ve done a bunch of volunteering as well. But sometimes when you’re on ground zero in 2026, volunteering, it’s just not going to cut it. It’s just not going to cut it. Like people do need to be compensated. That’s just my view on that.

Andy Crosbie: Yes. If we didn’t have funding to support what we do, if we were just asking local communities what they want and need, but we didn’t have the funding to actually make it happen afterwards, then all we’re doing is consultation. like Elijah, you were saying about like that word participatory and the baggage it comes with. Yeah. Consultation comes with just the same baggage. Yeah. So we, we couldn’t do lived experience decision-making without there being money for people to decide how to deploy. It would just devolve into consultation and volunteering like Elijah said.

Rufaro: I suppose we all have bills to pay even though the passion is there to feed into something. I like the concept you’ve all used of this ripple effect, you know, one drop can affect many, many, many different people along the way. Do you think that for a funder out there who’s listening and looks up your websites and, know, is really interested in the work that you do and they feel they want to feed into this impact that you are clearly demonstrating, do you think that funders recognise that local community building is valuable? Or would you say that place-based groups are not prioritised as much in the funding system?

Andy Crosbie:

I think funders often don’t understand the intricacies of place based working. So Rich especially talks a lot about building social infrastructure like we’ve talked about the ripple effects, like the unseen stuff. Elijah’s talked about that as well. And a big part of that then is also the networks of relationships that grow out of this. Again, Elijah, you talked about helping people with job applications because at least now they’ve got somebody, they’ve got a community that they can be part of here. This is not something you can put in a funding application and say, you know, this is, this is what we’re going to do, but that sort of that network, that social infrastructure is absolutely something that grows and grows and grows and grows over years out of this work. And it’s always indirect. So the pieces of work that we’ve done, we’ve done things like a deaf arts festival, we’ve got a sports and wellbeing program, we’ve got support for refugees and asylum seekers to develop their language skills. These are the projects that get funded. But the stuff, the really valuable stuff that grows out of all of these bits of work is the support, the relationships, the mutual understanding. That’s what makes the place stronger, but it always, it’s always slow. It always takes time and it always comes as a consequence, an indirect consequence of doing this other stuff.

Rufaro: Do you feel like maybe for funders, because it’s something you can’t actually put as a number, as a figure to actually show the metric of where the funding is going, that maybe that’s why it’s not prioritised or not seen by them in the same way?

Andy Crosbie: Yeah, I mean, it’s about the clarity of measurement, I think. There was a funder that we partnered with in one part of the work and they said at one point, we’ve spent 75,000 on infrastructure in order to distribute 25,000 pounds of funding. And they felt that that balance was just really off, 75K to distribute 25K. And I was really struck by that because that way of looking at things is very different to my way of looking at things. Because for me, the question is, okay, we spent a hundred thousand pounds and what has come from spending a hundred thousand pounds? The focus isn’t on distributing money. The focus is what grows from the money that you spent and all of this stuff about social infrastructure. People talk about the loneliness epidemic across the country. The work that we are doing is building social infrastructure. It’s building networks of relationships. It’s building these really tangible neighbourly relationships, but they’re not things that you can target. Like you can’t knock, go door to door and say, Hey, do you want to become neighbourly with me? So we do, we do these things that draw people in and we, we, we fund people’s time so that they can really get stuck in and all of this beautiful stuff blossoms out of it, but it’s indirect. It’s unpredictable. It’s often not measurable. And because of that, it doesn’t fit with existing funding structures.

Rufaro: It sounds like quite a challenge, hopefully for funders out there that are listening, they can see the unique placement of this type of work.

Rich Gibbons: I was just going to say that, and we’ve applied through traditional funders, you know, numerous times now, which actually is quite difficult when you can’t apply as the Gateshead Community Bridge Builders, by the way, because we’re not an incorporated entity and you need to, you know, be firmly sort of entrenched within the traditional way of doing things, which makes it difficult for us. So we’ve had to make applications through one of our host organisations and it’s just an odd, odd setup, but they don’t seem to fund very well towards what we do, which is essentially ecosystem building.

Through many both micro and macro things that go on in the work, we will be shifting the ecosystem in really tangible ways to talk about this through the lens of asylum seekers, for example. I am very, very confident now that an asylum seeker that finds themselves coming into Gatehead, their experience is vastly different to what it would have been five years ago. And that’s due to a massive series of little and large changes that have happened to do with how they can access support generally or support for languages, how people that are coming here with families get treated when they arrive and how their kids get connected to the right sort of medication that they need, things like that. The type of food that they can eat when they used to be in the hotels here. A whole series of different things have changed now because of the different projects and relationships that the bridge builders have helped to foster and the changes that have happened within some of the organisations and institutions that are connected to that asylum seeker system, like the refugee resettlement team, things like that, who often use some of the bridge builder work now to fire off ideas for their own sort of things that they do. The ecosystem’s fundamentally different now. That’s really hard to measure. It’s actually really hard for us to sort of highlight in a graph or anything like that that we would use to support an application to funding. And also funders tend to work in very short cycles. It’s like a project or maybe a year or two. And you just can’t do a meaningful part of this work in such a short amount of time. And I know that Elijah, you guys are doing your second year now and it’s going to look completely different to what it looks like in another five years. the fingers crossed that it keeps going for a long, time.

Elijah: Yeah

Rich Gibbons:  And we found that the work has shifted so much over the six years that we’ve been doing it in ways that you would never have imagined at the start, you know, also with the benefit of that’s a different conversation, what things that we would have done with the benefit of hindsight as well with the learning that we have now. But yeah, the traditional funding doesn’t usually give the opportunity to build things over a longer cycle. And that is a problem for place work.

Elijah: I think now, especially coming into, I would say the back end of last year into this year, I think the word place is really becoming popular. Like just place-based giving or place, like even the word place is getting major a lot more in like publications and online and so on and so forth. And I think that’s because we’re talking about traditional grant-making and stuff, I think in many areas up and down the country, the paperwork says that this amount of money went to this area. But when you go and you actually speak to anyone that lives there, they cannot tell you where that money went at all. Not only did they not know that there was funding even being available, he cannot see any difference. So I think funders, some of them are starting to be like, you know what, the way we’ve been doing it before, it’s not working or hasn’t really given out that type of effect. But I do agree with what both Andy and Rich said is that there are, I mean, what, like one year cycles, two year cycles, they have to show impact. Whatever organisation that is given the funding, they have a chief exec. They’re going to have their yearly board meeting. They’re going to have to show this amount of CSR. What did we do for it? Like, what can we also publicate to our shareholders that we’ve also done as well? So unfortunately, sometimes it clashes. To see the ripple effect, the real ripple effect, for example, may take four or five years.

It’s not gonna, I mean, you’re not gonna be able to walk into your yearly board meeting and say, like, don’t worry boss, in four years time, we’ll be able to show something. It’s just, it’s just not gonna work. But I do think that there are some that are starting to like understand that if we want our funding to reach the maximum amount of people and also when it comes down to community work or even charity work, there’s a lot of, I mean, we call them here the usual suspects that are always in every meeting. They’re always involved, which is very, very good. But they are always there and it almost becomes like an echo chamber because they’re always there. So it’s only their voice that gets heard. So when you are talking about the ripple effect and getting new people that may not have felt connected to their area, but they are now getting involved in a lot of the decision-making or they’re now getting involved in lot of the community work, you’re hearing brand new voices as well. That’s when I guess going into our year two and beyond.

When we’re talking to funders, that’s when we’re saying that I can definitely guarantee you that the voices that we have, the people that we know, you haven’t heard these voices before. These are brand new voices. These are fresh voices. And when we listen to them and we get them involved, you’re going to see even more, more impact. It’s not the usual suspects. No, these are brand new people that also live in the area that have gone through a process and that have come up through like our organisation, Gateshead’s organisation, like in terms of how we’ve trained them, how we brought them into the community. We haven’t just got them just directly off the road and they’re now saying that they want to start getting decision-making. They are involved in a community. So these are the voices that you need to be listening to if you really want your funding to really make that impact. And also as well with funders, I think one of the biggest things that I’ve had to do is trying to explain that the panel or the community is also impact measurement as well. It’s not just the funds going out to like, we gave this organisation this amount of funding to go do their project. It’s the people that actually made the decisions as well. We can measure that and we can reference that. It’s twofold. It’s the people that are making the decisions and it’s also the projects that are getting funded. Like, so it’s not a cash loss to help those people. It’s not a cash loss. It’s just like funding the project is not a cash loss. They are both measurable impacts. We not only just helped these projects, but the people that helped them. They have lives that are impacted and they’re impacting their community. That is also what our funding has done as well.

Rufaro: I guess it’s that ripple effect that we keep coming back to because impact can look differently and can be measured differently depending on how that funder decides to work with you. I suppose in conclusion, one thing I’m curious about for our listeners out there, be it a funder, be it someone who’s in their community and has decided, I would like to do something that is place-based where I am. Listening to you today, Gateshead, is at the mature side of their journey and Brent Giving has just started. What would maybe Andy and Rich, what would you say to Elijah, be it words of advice, words of encouragement, something that you would tell Brent Giving considering where they are in their journey? And likewise for you, Elijah, what would you say to Gateshead? Maybe that information or peer learning from the three of you might be beneficial for someone else that’s listening out there.

Rich Gibbons: I would say that peer learning is really beneficial. So creating networks of different place based work that’s up and down the country is really useful. We’ve got many now, Andy and I have just been arranging a residential that’s going to bring a lot of place based folk together into one place this summer, but getting good relationships with different groups and having more conversations with Andy and I and with other places. Yeah, that would be one of the best things that you could do, I think. What do you reckon, Andy?

Andy Crosbie: Yeah, you and I both go to the same place. One of the things that certainly I’ve been talking about for four years without making a lot of headway on is about the need for a national place movement. There are a growing number of sites up and down the country doing place work, doing them in different ways, but with significant crossover. And as Richard said, we’ve connected with a number of these places and from a peer learning and peer support perspective, it’s been invaluable.

Like learning about the ways that folk and other places are doing things differently, but with exactly the same motivation that you’ve got and you’re being able to share challenges and get different perspectives on how to overcome those challenges. That’s been massively valuable. At the same time, as we’ve touched on in this conversation, place work is still largely misunderstood, quite low on people’s radars, quite low on the priority orders. But as Elijah has said, there are more and more people talking about it. I certainly think that there is a strong future for place, but maybe what it will take is for the different places doing placework, connecting and advocating collectively to really get this on the agendas that it needs to be.

Rich Gibbons: We’ve all been to the conferences and the different events and then when you get, you have a good time there and you learn some stuff and then afterwards you get sucked back into the tunnel of your own work and the things that you have to do and that’s totally natural. But having some sort of way to like build sort of a common solidarity around the different places and people that doing this type of work would be really useful I think to create an agenda for place work so that it doesn’t move in trends. Because we’ve seen, I absolutely agree with you Elijah, that place is definitely kind of a buzzword at the moment now. And it has been in the past before and then it’s fallen out of that and then came back and then out. So this, this kind of happens, but it’s to put it on the sort of the map as an approach that we can, you know, there’s a lot of sort of common things that we can agree on.

Rufaro: And I suppose on your end, Elijah, as a younger organisation, is there anything that I suppose you’ve seen in, you know, what you’ve done that maybe Gateshead has done differently that you could offer as advice or just thoughts or reflections throughout your journey in year one?

Elijah: I mean, I would definitely say, I agree just to touch on what Andy was saying is that luckily we’re part of the London funders network. So there’s 32 boroughs. The idea is that all of them are going to have a giving There’s Brent giving, Islington giving, Camden giving and so on. So we are able to piggyback off like what other givings are doing in the area or like in the city. And you are right. Every borough, even if we’re neighbours, they do things slightly different. The way that we do it is not the way that the other boroughs do it. So I do think if it was a national movement, that would even be a lot stronger. We could definitely, I think, connect more and learn more. From Brent Giving’s point of view, it’s just like a fresh pair of eyes, I would say, you know, with whatever processes that you’re doing. I mean, I consider myself quite radical. So I’d love to come down and just to see how is the day-to-day running. I mean, definitely, we’ll definitely splash some some ideas or like have a look and see, look, how about this? How about that? I guess the advantage of being new is that we can pivot very quickly. We haven’t got all the rotate down at the moment. So we can definitely pivot very, and we have, we have pivoted quite a lot. If you asked me within the first six months to the end of the year, it was very different. So we were able to really change as we go along. But I think there needs to be room for that as well. Even if you are a bit more established, like, you know, like maybe changing the ideas and changing the approach. That’s the main thing that I can give like, is to come down or have more conversations like this and to actually get into the nuts and bolts. think once you actually go there, you actually meet the people, you shake their hands and then you can actually see what’s happening there.

Rufaro: No, that sounds amazing. I hope at least I’ve sparked enough curiosity to get that connection going, be it with the three guests that we have on the show today, or even for our listeners who are probably looking up Brent giving and Gateshead Community Bridge Builders right now. Hopefully it sparks that curiosity for people to learn more about what place-based work is, how that ripple effect actually works on the ground, and some of the challenges that you’ve gone through. But thank you so much for your time. It’s been a very insightful discussion. I’ve certainly learned a lot. And like I always say for us as a fiscal host, we’re always at the intersection of seeing the amazing work that you’re doing on the ground. So congratulations on everything that you’ve achieved. And we hope we continue to be a part of this amazing journey.

Andy, Rich, Elijah, thank you so much for your time. I hope you have enjoyed it as well.

That was a very enjoyable discussion. I think you can all agree that there’s so much to take away from this conversation, including the benefits of creating opportunities for people who may not always see those fitting into decision-making spaces. 

We’ve seen how some of the most valuable impact this work creates, like confidence, relationships, support, and stronger communities, are not always the easiest things to measure, but that doesn’t make them any less important and it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be funded. If anything you’ve heard today has resonated with you, we’d really encourage you to go and learn more about the incredible work of Gateshead Community Bridge Builders and Brent Giving. Support them in any way you can, whether that’s through finding collaboration, opportunities with them, through funding, or simply just having a conversation. 

If you’re a funder or part of a group working closely with communities, we hope this has given you something that you can reflect on particularly when it comes to how funding can better support the work that’s already happening on the ground. If you’re interested in funding a place-based movement, please do get in touch with us. And if you’re group or pooled fund looking for support, a fiscal host, or a distributor for your place-based work, we’d really love to hear from you. 

If you’d like to join the discussion on place-based work and what’s going on in our communities, why not join us for our Wild Times Un-Conference on the 15th of September in Birmingham?

You can find more information by visiting our website www.wildtimesuk.org. Thank you so, much again for my lovely guests today and we hope you tune in again next time.