S1: #7 — Introducing ‘The Ideas Fund’
Well, my best laid plans and intentions to do weekly weeknotes didn’t come to fruition. I let the busy schedule overtake the time I had set aside for this, which I promised myself I wouldn’t do. And yet, here we are a few months later. The good news is that everything has been progressing well and I think we have come up with a very exciting funding programme.
What have I been doing?
The Ideas Fund
- We have spent several months refining the funding prototype and now have it almost finalised
- We anticipate two rounds of funding — we have been designing round one and will wait to design any future rounds once this has been reviewed
- Round one has been designed to reflect all the input from the co-design workshops
The first round will be based in four regional locations across the UK. We are currently finalising these, but will be including areas with the following features:
- A place-based approach will enable us to focus on supporting those communities who may not typically apply for this kind of funding
- To do this, we will have a supported application journey with Development Co-ordinators in each of the four areas providing assertive outreach. They will promote the funding programme, encourage people to apply, support people to develop their ideas, and link communities with researchers where needed
- We are looking at a series of events to support people in developing their idea
- We are making the application process as simple as possible and will be testing this out with our co-design group this week led by TSIP
- We will be using a participatory grant making approach — involving people from each of the four areas in the decisions about what to fund. Hannah Paterson who completed her Winston Churchill Fellowship on Participatory Grant-Making is supporting us with this.
- Ongoing support will be provided for grant holders — we are currently working out what this will look like
The Team
I am excited to say that we have the core team in place!!!
Tariq Shabazz is our new Grants Co-ordinator and started with us in October. Tariq’s previous experience includes roles at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, Amnesty International UK Children’s Human Rights Network and Westminster City Council. He also holds not one but two Masters degrees — one in International Relations and another in Understanding and Securing Human Rights.
Jill Wells will join the team as the Grants Manager. For the last few years, Jill has been a Programmes and Partnerships Manager with the Co-op Foundation, overseeing the grants team. Jill has set up and delivered a range of grants programmes, largely focusing on young people and loneliness. Prior to that, Jill worked in the student’s union and community and voluntary sectors.
Chris Manion will join the team as the Head of Grants. Chris has worked at The National Lottery Fund for thirteen years in a range of roles setting up and delivering grants programmes. He spent a significant number of years heading up the East Africa Disability Fund and was integral in the setup of the international shift the power network in the UK.
Funders are often criticised for being too London-centric however these roles were advertised nationally. So, for me, the exciting things is that the team is outside of London — Tariq and Jill are based in Manchester and Chris is based in Birmingham
We have to wait for the locations to be agreed before the wider Development Co-ordinators are out in place so I will provide more details in the following weeknotes.
Branding and Comms Work
- Red Stone have done a fabulous job in leading on the branding activity. The Brand Steering Group, which included some members of the co-design workshops, inputted in the design and were very happy with the results.
- We have been working with Martha Robinson on the comms strategy which is all coming together and are planning for the full launch in mid-January.
Application Guidance and Questions
- I must say, this has been a bigger piece of work than I could have anticipated. It threw up more questions for us about eligibility and criteria and forced us to develop and debate examples of the type of things we might want to fund. Ultimately, it has made the guidance better for it.
- However, even when we had clarity about the guidance content, the next step was to make it engaging and easy to understand.
- Luckily, The Liminal Space came to the rescue and did a great job at helping us communicate in simple clear language what the fund is about. We are testing this out with the co-design group this week, and their feedback will help us evolve it further.
Public Engagement Support
In the last few months, Lewis Hou from Science Ceilidh and Helen Featherstone who leads on Public Engagement at Bath University have been instrumental in helping us refine our model, our guidance and enabling us to navigate the world of public engagement. They are providing us with excellent checks and challenge us to make sure we don’t miss anything from a public engagement perspective.
Mental Wellbeing Theme
- We were a bit torn when it came to decisions around choosing a theme or a target demographic. The participants at the co-design sessions were keen to point out that it would be difficult to choose a specific target demographic as diverse populations differ from area to area. Specific themes that were relevant to everyone could also be challenging.
- However, mental wellbeing came up time and time again, and given the current COVID situation, there are not many people whose mental wellbeing isn’t being affected, to a greater or lesser extent in one way or another.
- So, we decided that in our guidance, we will ask people to consider proposals that work with diverse communities but leave space for people to consider who this might be locally. Alongside this, we will have mental wellbeing as a theme, as it is such a cross cutting issue.
- Mental Health is also one of Wellcome strategic priorities, so it makes sense for us to compliment this.
Grant Management System
- Hyphen8 have continued their great work with the development of our grant management system, Salesforce.
- We are aiming to develop an application process where the applicant has lots of information and prompts as they complete the form.
- We are also developing Salesforce Community Cloud to smooth the grant-making process and enable communication between us and grant holders around the mechanics of the grant to be in one place.
Reflections
- The importance of language and definitions has become even more important as we have been drafting the guidance and confirming the criteria. Ultimately, we are bringing together people with different experiences and expertise from varying sectors that all use different language. For example, what is patient public involvement v’s public engagement? What do we mean by research or researcher? Are we talking about mental health, mental ill-health, mental health and wellbeing or mental wellbeing? I will get into these in more detail in later weeknotes to come.
- We are asking communities and researchers to work together around ideas on mental wellbeing. However, do they need to be researcher in relation to mental health? My view is that we are looking at population level mental wellbeing which is inter-disciplinary therefore we should be looking at researchers beyond the mental health arena.
- Another challenge has been how to have conversations with potential locations and manage expectations — we can’t go with them all so some of them we won’t take forward. But it takes several conversations with a range of people in those local areas to determine if they are suitable. Saying ‘thanks but no thanks’ is never easy, especially when we have been speaking to fantastic people in areas that could all benefit from this funding programme
Achievements
- I truly believe that we have a funding programme that stays true to the input from the co-design work and puts communities in the driving seat when it comes to public engagement. I am incredibly proud of this.
- Launching with only one-month delay and not getting side-tracked by COVID. The delay was only due to recruitment lag after sign off from Wellcome following the development phase — our recruitment timeline was too ambitious initially.
- There have been many more small wins along the way, but these are the two that stand out.