Town & Country Planning, September 2005
It is one of the big lies of modern philanthropy. Maybe it is the big lie. Either way, it is one of those embarrassing reality disjunctions that nobody involved in grant-giving seems prepared to discuss.
The problem is that there are little or no sources of local grants for local activity, and this is a serious hurdle in the development of local anything, let alone local-ism.
The result is that charities, big and small, are increasingly dependent on central funding, and this has some peculiar results.
It is now, for example, relatively easy to raise grant funding to evaluate something: central funders always value measuring skills above delivering skills.
It is also quite possible to get money to start an innovative project on the ground.
The problem is that there is really no chance of raising money to continue a project that has proved itself on the ground, and is making a measurable and important difference to people’s lives or where they live.
No, say the philanthropists, with an air of self-satisfaction. It is time to hand over the project to the statutory sector.
But of course, as we all know, the chances of local funding from our poor ring-fenced, targeted and cash-strapped local authorities is practically zilch.
We know that. The statutory sector knows that, but the philanthropists turn a blind eye – fearing they will be stuck for decades keeping their most successful creations alive.
Result 1: a long succession of innovative but short-lived programmes, none of which last longer than two years, but which keep the charity workers involved employed.
Result 2: the very informal local groups, often around churches and mosques, that do an enormous amount of basic visiting and befriending – and without which our neighbourhoods would often shrivel up completely – find themselves unable to compete with the sophisticated grantsmanship of the bigger charities.
Result 3: we all become subject to the whims of the increasingly distant, centralised Big Lottery Fund, as it is now called. A worthy institution, which has done good work, but which has no interest whatever in what actually goes on locally – as long as you tick the right boxes to predict the precise racial breakdown of everyone who will benefit from their money.
A friend of mine who asked the lottery for support when £12,000 of his grant was siphoned off by another charity, which promptly went bankrupt, heard absolutely nothing in response to his entreaties for six months.
Then all he got was a demand that it be repaid – when a little legal muscle at the right time probably would have got the money back.
Central philanthropy has no interest in the intricacies of what is needed on the ground, no interest in much except innovation, no excitement at success and precious few twitches of concern about failures. It is a bloodless, virtual business.
It also entrenches the current system whereby a large proportion of regeneration grants and investment is quietly siphoned off by the professional development workers – fearful that the supposed beneficiaries are too ‘vulnerable’ to be trusted with co-delivery status.
That is, in fact, how we now fund the voluntary sector. It is the very opposite of localism.
It explains the participation fatigue you find anywhere remotely disadvantaged. It also explains the new community centres, staffed by professionals, which echo in their miserable emptiness.
What do we do about it? Well, for starters we should back the amendment to the National Lottery Bill, tabled as I write by two Liberal Democrat MPs, to protect it from political interference.
But don’t let’s stop there. Let’s break up and devolve the Big Lottery as well. Make it responsible to the public – not nationally via the Daily Mail – but via local authorities to local voters.
We might also require all community development grants to be paid back by the beneficiary neighbourhoods – not in money obviously, but in time spent spreading the benefits deeper into the community, providing mutual support, using skills, getting skills or whatever else is appropriate.
In other words, let’s make grants reciprocal. Not reciprocal in the sense that they are now: grants given to charities in return for specific but barely relevant targets delivered.
But building a new reciprocal relationship between the grant-giver and the neighbourhood that the intermediary is forced to encourage if the project is going to succeed.
The Wales Institute of Complementary Currencies, based at the University of Wales at Newport, has rolled out an ambitious series of Time Centres in the Welsh Valleys along similar lines.
A proportion of the original grants are spent on rewards or trips that recognise the efforts that local people are making, in mutual support – or taking over the running of their own community centres.
It isn’t exactly localism, but at least it brings neighbourhoods alive again.
The current centralised regime of philanthropy delivers a frightening quietness in the neighbourhoods they are trying to help, where people give up on the endless short-lived projects, and back off the bureaucracy of applying for money centrally themselves.
Then – with exhausted relief – they hand over the work to professional development workers from some gigantic voluntary sector agency delivering government targets.