We are delighted to be leading one of the first projects being supported by the National Lottery Community Fund’s new UK Fund. At a time when people can feel increasingly isolated, the fund aims to support organisations “to help communities come together and help make us a better-connected society”.
Our project focuses on crucial local community organisations. It aims to ensure they can continue to support their communities as well as scaling up what they do to connect people. It brings together the national membership networks for local community organisations across the UK: Locality, Development Trusts Association Scotland, Development Trusts Association Wales and Development Trusts Northern Ireland.
We believe that across our memberships we have perhaps the most finely-tuned vehicles for building community connection.
Recent years have been uniquely challenging for local communities. But Locality research has documented exactly how community organisations have played their crucial connection role from crisis to crisis:
- In 2018, we published “Future Places: How community organisations can drive post-Brexit renewal”, which set out how community organisations were bringing people together after the tensions of the EU referendum
- In early 2020, we published research which showed how community organisations act as “cogs of connection”, joining up disparate public service systems and connecting up all parts of their community
- This role was put to the test by COVID-19, and our report “We Were Built For This” highlighted how community organisations led the local response, connecting up street-level activity with the wider public sector.
However, we have identified two key challenges facing community organisations, which threaten their ability to continue to connect.
The first is existential. These are uniquely difficult times for community organisations, coming out of a pandemic into a cost of living crisis, on top of a decade-plus of austerity. So simply sustaining these vital cogs of connection is an increasingly critical task.
The second is about the evolving nature of their role. A Locality member engagement exercise in 2019 highlighted how the austerity years had shifted members’ role – from providing broad community development support which was additional to state provision, towards stepping in to deliver more basic services, starkly demonstrated by a rise in food bank provision.
This has been compounded by wider policy changes post-2010, with a shift from grants to contracts requiring a greater focus on service delivery. The onset of the pandemic, followed by the cost of living crisis, have heightened the focus on an emergency service provision role.
This all militates against community organisations playing their broader connection role, as if they can achieve funding, it is to provide specific services on a short-term basis, rather than having the ability to play a longer-term community building role.
So as the leading national infrastructure organisations supporting community organisations across the UK, we have identified this as a critical moment. This project provides a unique opportunity for us to come together and unleash our networks’ huge connection potential.
We are not in a position to unwind the wider policy environment that has been undermining community organisations’ ability to play their connecting role to the full. But through our work together we can provide community organisations with the support they need to remain strong and successful through uncertain times, helping them lead local systems change and developing and scaling innovative connection practice.
Our project – Connectors-UK - is shaped around two, interlinked strands which strengthen and support each other.
The first strand is about building stronger foundations for communities to connect. The core aim of this strand is to sustain and develop our member support, with a particular focus on peer learning opportunities, so community leaders can learn in real time from each other what’s working and share emerging best practice.
The second strand will dive deep into the connection potential we know exists across our memberships, providing practical support to unlock barriers, test ideas and incubate new models.
We’ll be sharing more information about what to expect from Connectors-UK over the next three years. We’re grateful for the support from the National Lottery Community Fund, to enable us to work together to support community organisations’ huge connection potential across the UK.
