NEWS: Steps to Sustainability: 18 months of supporting grassroots organisations
Directors of the Ubuntu Multicultural Centre CIC
Summary
22 grassroots organisations supported through our capacity-building programme, Steps to Sustainability, have now received over £1 million in funding. This is a significant milestone, and excellent news for the marginalised communities they support.
Steps to Sustainability (formerly branded as Steps to Recovery) is Civil Society Consulting’s flagship initiative, through which we provide free consultancy support to grassroots organisations led by and for marginalised communities, whilst coaching and upskilling them. In the latest iteration of ‘S2S’, funded by the National Lottery Community Fund, we have supported 22 organisations to raise £1.45 million. Most recently:
Rochdale-based mental health organisation Awakening Minds secured £160,000, having co-produced an impact report and a film (among other outputs too!);
Refugee support organisation Caring and Sharing, also in Rochdale, secured £190,000, having been coached, developed and actively supported to collect impact data, produce an impact report, with valuable testimonials;
Middlesbrough-based Ubuntu Multicultural Centre have been awarded £100,000, having co-produced a survey and report to evidence impact - alongside developing their organisations in other ways.
These deserving organisations now have the support they need to support the communities they know and love. We celebrated and discussed their success in our virtual coffee club meeting on 24 Jan.
Organisations led by and for marginalised communities are unrivalled in providing effective support to under-served communities. However, these same organisations are less developed and under-resourced due to additional barriers they face in accessing funding and resources. Thanks to funding from the National Lottery, we have provided free consultancy support to 127 grassroots organisations across the country through our flagship S2S programme.
The CSC team created Steps to Sustainability as a response to the pandemic which brought inequities in the social sector into sharp relief. Organisations led by and for marginalised communities were seeing huge increases in demand – as their communities were being hit hardest – however they were the least equipped to ‘thrive and survive’ due to additional barriers they faced in receiving funding.
S2S is designed to support organisations led by and for marginalised communities to develop long-term capacity/resilience to enable them to exist in the sector on a level playing field with other organisations, whilst achieving some immediate gains! We work with them in a one-to-one relational way, providing hands-on support to co-produce up to five tangible outputs (e.g. an impact report, a new website) - while coaching and upskilling them on how to do so. This personalised, learning-by-doing approach ensures that skills are meaningfully transferred, and organisations also come out with tangible outputs at the end.
Aside from the funding that we have supported organisations to generate - over £1 million to date - S2S has empowered grassroots organisations and their leaders - they feel more valued, more confident navigating the sector, and are more energised by their work. This is what some of the groups have said about their experience of the programme:
"I don’t have the language to be able to explain my work to funders. Over the years my funding applications have been rejected. But with this new one, I communicated what we do to build community cohesion and our health and wellbeing projects. We created a video and did a survey to evidence the need of our local refugees and our potential to help them… It is a good method I have learnt for future applications. We have secured £66,000 to create an inclusive community garden for refugees in Redcar to have a sense of community and better mental health.’ – Azad Mohammed, Saabat Gallery CIC
"Civil Society Consulting developed our impact report, which is proving to be an invaluable tool in helping our organisation present itself to funders. Having the report saves us time so we can focus on our work supporting black and ethnic minorities in Middlesbrough, rather than funding applications." – John Kabye, Ubuntu Multicultural Centre, CIC
“Working with Civil Society Consulting, we have made so much progress in how best to navigate challenges and create opportunities for our community work. We have made progress in our capacity to confidently bid for funding and provide intellectual analysis to support our claims.” – Jide Macaulay, House of Rainbows CIC
Through delivering S2S, and producing relevant research for NPC and LGBT+ Consortium, we are ever more convinced about the value of supporting grassroots, minority-led organisations. Thanks to their agility, knowledge and understanding of their communities’ issues, and their communities’ trust, they are highly effective at providing targeted and relevant support. Public services struggle to reach minoritised and intersectional communities, which leaves minority-led organisations ‘fill in the gaps’. But if we properly resource and support minority-led organisations, we can turn this negative into a positive, as these same organisations are unmatched in their capacity to build trust with public institutions and improve health and wellbeing outcomes in underserved communities.
Through our delivery of S2S, we are also learning and improving from participants’ feedback: for example, organisations have built fruitful and supportive connections with the other organisations passing through the programme at the same time as them, particularly when the organisations are doing similar work and/or in the same geography. In upcoming iterations, we are delivering S2S in small cohorts of 3-8, with a thematic and/or place-based focus and with regular group catch-ups to keep momentum and build connections. In fact, we have started this work already, working with a cohort of 5 youth-led faith-based organisations in partnership with The Faith and Belief Forum.
The CSC team created Steps to Sustainability as a response to the pandemic which brought inequities in the social sector into sharp relief. Organisations led by and for marginalised communities were seeing huge increases in demand – as their communities were being hit hardest – however they were least equipped to ‘thrive and survive’.
Thanks to funding from the National Lottery, not only have the CSC team created considerable depth of impact in communities across the UK, but also it has also informed our wider thinking about inequalities within the social sector, which has inspired a deep passion within the organisation to advocate for organisations led by and for marginalised communities across our work in the organisation and beyond!
If you are a corporate or infrastructure charity interested in learning about how S2S can be leveraged to help your communities, request an introduction with one of our directors. We can explain our pitch.
