Complexity In Charitable Funding - A tale from the front line
Forwarded Verbatim from my brother, a mental health recovery volunteer based on The Isle of Wight...
Between 2016 and 2017 a group of mental health service users and volunteers from Quay House, a mental health recovery centre in Newport on the Isle of Wight, got together to try and solve a problem. The problem they were trying to solve was that people with disabilities were having their benefits stopped, and being put on JobSeeker’s Allowance, not because they’d suddenly become well, but because the government was making cut-backs, and part of those cut-backs involved tightening up the criteria regarding which medical conditions qualified for financial support, leaving thousands of people in a very precarious place.
By precarious, we’re talking about people with serious health conditions, who may have been out of work for many years, that are having their sole source of income reduced from £106 to just £73 per week, while having pressure put upon them to take the first job they seem capable of, and being put under the constant threat of sanctions, i.e. having their JobSeeker’s Allowance stopped should they arrive late for an appointment or an interview, or in any other way fail to tick every box and jump through every hoop that the DWP puts before them.
At Quay House we saw the massive amounts of anxiety, depression and outright fear that these cut-backs were generating. We saw how people were becoming afraid to get well, in case they were forced back into work before they were ready. We saw people being pressured into applying for jobs that had nothing in common with their skills and aspirations. We saw how the fear and stress were creating the perfect conditions for a major health relapse – a crisis, whereby individuals were experiencing psychotic break so serious (sometimes accompanies by suicide attempts) that they needed to be sectioned - taken into to NHS in-patient wards to undergo 24 hour monitoring and intensive medical treatment. At this point their benefits would usually be reinstated, at least until they came out again, when the cycle would be repeated.
If the cut-backs were working, in terms of saving tax-payers money, then it would be easier to understand and tolerate them, but they are so clearly failing, financially, medically, and ethically speaking, that's it's difficult to imagine the kind of thinking that inspired them, and continues to leave them in place. The kind of of thinking that targets the most vulnerable members of our society, and the least able to defend themselves and communicate their suffering.
This was the problem that we were striving to resolve. There was a core team of around 5 of us at Quay House that were really motivated to try and do something about it. We starting meeting every week, and founded a project called the BRIDGE Initiative, BRIDGE standing for Blueprint for Recovery, Independence, Development, Guidance and Entrepreneurialism. The idea being to create a social enterprise hub, that would provide the infrastructure necessary for people with disabilities to start their own small business, i.e. free office space for up to 3 years, training in admin and book-keeping, and a small start-up grant.
We were confident that we could make it work (following in the footsteps of pioneering projects such as the 'Jericho Foundation' in Birmingham, who were doing something similar and proving to be very successful) because we were applying some simple, common sense principles, (a) the people who would be using the service were designing it, helping to ensure that it would be fit for purpose, (b) we planned on giving participants the time they needed to gradually build up their confidence, energy levels, and skills, to minimise the degree of stress they experienced, helping to ensure their recovery and the success of their endeavour, and (c) we’d give people control over their own future and the type of work they’d be doing. It was pretty simple stuff, but so very few organisations, least of all the DWP, were putting these ideas into practice.
So we had meetings once a week, and put together a business plan, a Constitution, and completed the long and complex Big Lottery application form. In fact we ended up making 21 revision to that application over the course of 12 months, as we periodically emailed it to Sarah Carroll, our contact at the Big Lottery Fund, for feedback.
We also gave presentations to raise awareness and to receive feedback on the project, and were encouraged by the Big Lottery to conduct market research to determine if there was a demand for the service that we were proposing. We were confident that there was a demand, because we were in constant touch with the 200+ service users at Quay House, many of whom were desperate for the kind of support and empowerment that BRIDGE would provide, but we’d anticipated a certain amount of box-ticking and hoop jumping to secure a significant amount of funding, so we conducted market research and gathered the data we were encouraged to obtain.
And, after 12 months of meetings, creating documents, form-filling, research and presentations, we sent the latest draft of our funding bid to the Big Lottery fund for their consideration. This time it didn't come back with suggestions for more revisions, but was flatly and permanently rejected. The members of the BRIDGE Initiative weren’t given an official explanation regarding why, the decision had been conveyed via a telephone call to a senior staff member at Quay House, who in-turn explained to us that he'd been told that "the Big Lottery fund didn’t feel that our project was in keeping with their objectives”. We were left slightly dumbfounded by this, having committed so much time, energy and resources to ticking every box and jumping through every hoop that the Lottery had put before us, and also because the explanation make no sense. The Big Lottery website states that their objectives are, “Bringing real improvements to communities, and the lives of people most in need.” which seemed a pretty much perfect description of what we were trying to do.
It was later explained to us by someone with a good deal of experience in Lottery applications that the real reason that our application was denied probably came down to numbers. The Lottery will fund projects that look like they’re going to be successful, and it defines success as the number of beneficiaries per year that that service helps. Bigger numbers look better, so are more likely to get funding. On the surface this seems a pretty good way of allocating funds, but on deeper inspection you might find, as we did, that this method of gauging success is actually very narrow, and can be exploited by organisations that focus more on delivering numbers on paper, than adding real value on the ground.
For example, there was a project in Southampton called the 'Wheatsheaf Trust', a group seeking Big Lottery funding at the same time that we were. Their remit was simply to get people with disabilities back in to work. Little emphasis was placed on training, or how appropriate a given job was to the individual being proposed for it, because that its primarily focus was on getting the largest number of disabled people off benefits, and back into work. This kind of project looked very good on paper (from the Lottery’s perspective), because it had a high turn-over of beneficiaries. How much or how little help those individual's received had no baring whatsoever on their means of gauging success, and in fact, the more people that this project failed - that ended up being recycled back into the system time and time again because they put forward for jobs that they were unable to maintain, the more successful they would appear, on paper, to be.
The BRIDGE Initiative on the other hand planned to invest a significant amount of time and resources into each individual, to cure a social problem rather than stick a plaster on it. We were looking for long term solutions, that involved creating new businesses and new jobs that weren’t there before, taking people off benefits permanently, helping them to reach their full potential, and reducing the strain on healthcare services. Ours was a potent little remedy for both social and economic regeneration, targeting a area sorely in need of both. Admittedly it would have been a cure on a very small scale, but once the model had been established and proved effective, it could have been reproduced a hundred or a thousand times across the county.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, The Wheatsheaf Trust did received Lottery funding, shortly before our application was denied. So what’s the conclusion here? The conclusion is that the Lottery, an institution we give massive amounts of power to through the hundreds of millions of pounds that we allow them to control, seem to be more interested in appearing to be successful, than in actually delivering successful outcomes on the ground, perhaps just because real success is harder to measure. Measuring real success would require taking an overview of the bigger picture, and adopting a subtler and more nuanced system than looking at numbers on a piece of paper. But when such vast sums are at stake, and so many people’s lives, perhaps it’s time the Big Lottery fund, and other large organisations entrusted with awarding grants, expanded the criteria that define how they measure success.
After all, how hard can it be to establish a broader points-scoring system? Or better yet a grant manager who could consider the bigger picture, including the depth of support provided to each individual, and the breadth of benefits that percolate out into the surrounding community, who can then make a judgement call based on his or her experience and the overall good that it could achieve... bringing human beings back into the loop, along with a little vision, common sense and compassion.
Until then, the Big Lottery may wish to revise their objectives to bring them more into line with reality, perhaps changing them to something like: “Providing a tiny amount of support to a large number of people, so that we look good on paper and get to keep our jobs." Just a thought, should reality ever become a point of interest.
Sam Schroeder - a mental health volunteer
PS ~ You might want to Google ‘Calum’s List’, a running total of people with disabilities that have been declared fit for work and forced into employment, shortly before dying as a result of their health condition.
PPS ~ And also look out for the award winning Ken Loach film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, a harrowingly accurate portrayal of the current benefits system, and how it’s affecting the most vulnerable among us.
Between 2016 and 2017 a group of mental health service users and volunteers from Quay House, a mental health recovery centre in Newport on the Isle of Wight, got together to try and solve a problem. The problem they were trying to solve was that people with disabilities were having their benefits stopped, and being put on JobSeeker’s Allowance, not because they’d suddenly become well, but because the government was making cut-backs, and part of those cut-backs involved tightening up the criteria regarding which medical conditions qualified for financial support, leaving thousands of people in a very precarious place.
By precarious, we’re talking about people with serious health conditions, who may have been out of work for many years, that are having their sole source of income reduced from £106 to just £73 per week, while having pressure put upon them to take the first job they seem capable of, and being put under the constant threat of sanctions, i.e. having their JobSeeker’s Allowance stopped should they arrive late for an appointment or an interview, or in any other way fail to tick every box and jump through every hoop that the DWP puts before them.
At Quay House we saw the massive amounts of anxiety, depression and outright fear that these cut-backs were generating. We saw how people were becoming afraid to get well, in case they were forced back into work before they were ready. We saw people being pressured into applying for jobs that had nothing in common with their skills and aspirations. We saw how the fear and stress were creating the perfect conditions for a major health relapse – a crisis, whereby individuals were experiencing psychotic break so serious (sometimes accompanies by suicide attempts) that they needed to be sectioned - taken into to NHS in-patient wards to undergo 24 hour monitoring and intensive medical treatment. At this point their benefits would usually be reinstated, at least until they came out again, when the cycle would be repeated.
If the cut-backs were working, in terms of saving tax-payers money, then it would be easier to understand and tolerate them, but they are so clearly failing, financially, medically, and ethically speaking, that's it's difficult to imagine the kind of thinking that inspired them, and continues to leave them in place. The kind of of thinking that targets the most vulnerable members of our society, and the least able to defend themselves and communicate their suffering.
This was the problem that we were striving to resolve. There was a core team of around 5 of us at Quay House that were really motivated to try and do something about it. We starting meeting every week, and founded a project called the BRIDGE Initiative, BRIDGE standing for Blueprint for Recovery, Independence, Development, Guidance and Entrepreneurialism. The idea being to create a social enterprise hub, that would provide the infrastructure necessary for people with disabilities to start their own small business, i.e. free office space for up to 3 years, training in admin and book-keeping, and a small start-up grant.
We were confident that we could make it work (following in the footsteps of pioneering projects such as the 'Jericho Foundation' in Birmingham, who were doing something similar and proving to be very successful) because we were applying some simple, common sense principles, (a) the people who would be using the service were designing it, helping to ensure that it would be fit for purpose, (b) we planned on giving participants the time they needed to gradually build up their confidence, energy levels, and skills, to minimise the degree of stress they experienced, helping to ensure their recovery and the success of their endeavour, and (c) we’d give people control over their own future and the type of work they’d be doing. It was pretty simple stuff, but so very few organisations, least of all the DWP, were putting these ideas into practice.
So we had meetings once a week, and put together a business plan, a Constitution, and completed the long and complex Big Lottery application form. In fact we ended up making 21 revision to that application over the course of 12 months, as we periodically emailed it to Sarah Carroll, our contact at the Big Lottery Fund, for feedback.
We also gave presentations to raise awareness and to receive feedback on the project, and were encouraged by the Big Lottery to conduct market research to determine if there was a demand for the service that we were proposing. We were confident that there was a demand, because we were in constant touch with the 200+ service users at Quay House, many of whom were desperate for the kind of support and empowerment that BRIDGE would provide, but we’d anticipated a certain amount of box-ticking and hoop jumping to secure a significant amount of funding, so we conducted market research and gathered the data we were encouraged to obtain.
And, after 12 months of meetings, creating documents, form-filling, research and presentations, we sent the latest draft of our funding bid to the Big Lottery fund for their consideration. This time it didn't come back with suggestions for more revisions, but was flatly and permanently rejected. The members of the BRIDGE Initiative weren’t given an official explanation regarding why, the decision had been conveyed via a telephone call to a senior staff member at Quay House, who in-turn explained to us that he'd been told that "the Big Lottery fund didn’t feel that our project was in keeping with their objectives”. We were left slightly dumbfounded by this, having committed so much time, energy and resources to ticking every box and jumping through every hoop that the Lottery had put before us, and also because the explanation make no sense. The Big Lottery website states that their objectives are, “Bringing real improvements to communities, and the lives of people most in need.” which seemed a pretty much perfect description of what we were trying to do.
It was later explained to us by someone with a good deal of experience in Lottery applications that the real reason that our application was denied probably came down to numbers. The Lottery will fund projects that look like they’re going to be successful, and it defines success as the number of beneficiaries per year that that service helps. Bigger numbers look better, so are more likely to get funding. On the surface this seems a pretty good way of allocating funds, but on deeper inspection you might find, as we did, that this method of gauging success is actually very narrow, and can be exploited by organisations that focus more on delivering numbers on paper, than adding real value on the ground.
For example, there was a project in Southampton called the 'Wheatsheaf Trust', a group seeking Big Lottery funding at the same time that we were. Their remit was simply to get people with disabilities back in to work. Little emphasis was placed on training, or how appropriate a given job was to the individual being proposed for it, because that its primarily focus was on getting the largest number of disabled people off benefits, and back into work. This kind of project looked very good on paper (from the Lottery’s perspective), because it had a high turn-over of beneficiaries. How much or how little help those individual's received had no baring whatsoever on their means of gauging success, and in fact, the more people that this project failed - that ended up being recycled back into the system time and time again because they put forward for jobs that they were unable to maintain, the more successful they would appear, on paper, to be.
The BRIDGE Initiative on the other hand planned to invest a significant amount of time and resources into each individual, to cure a social problem rather than stick a plaster on it. We were looking for long term solutions, that involved creating new businesses and new jobs that weren’t there before, taking people off benefits permanently, helping them to reach their full potential, and reducing the strain on healthcare services. Ours was a potent little remedy for both social and economic regeneration, targeting a area sorely in need of both. Admittedly it would have been a cure on a very small scale, but once the model had been established and proved effective, it could have been reproduced a hundred or a thousand times across the county.
Anyway, as you can probably guess, The Wheatsheaf Trust did received Lottery funding, shortly before our application was denied. So what’s the conclusion here? The conclusion is that the Lottery, an institution we give massive amounts of power to through the hundreds of millions of pounds that we allow them to control, seem to be more interested in appearing to be successful, than in actually delivering successful outcomes on the ground, perhaps just because real success is harder to measure. Measuring real success would require taking an overview of the bigger picture, and adopting a subtler and more nuanced system than looking at numbers on a piece of paper. But when such vast sums are at stake, and so many people’s lives, perhaps it’s time the Big Lottery fund, and other large organisations entrusted with awarding grants, expanded the criteria that define how they measure success.
After all, how hard can it be to establish a broader points-scoring system? Or better yet a grant manager who could consider the bigger picture, including the depth of support provided to each individual, and the breadth of benefits that percolate out into the surrounding community, who can then make a judgement call based on his or her experience and the overall good that it could achieve... bringing human beings back into the loop, along with a little vision, common sense and compassion.
Until then, the Big Lottery may wish to revise their objectives to bring them more into line with reality, perhaps changing them to something like: “Providing a tiny amount of support to a large number of people, so that we look good on paper and get to keep our jobs." Just a thought, should reality ever become a point of interest.
Sam Schroeder - a mental health volunteer
PS ~ You might want to Google ‘Calum’s List’, a running total of people with disabilities that have been declared fit for work and forced into employment, shortly before dying as a result of their health condition.
PPS ~ And also look out for the award winning Ken Loach film ‘I, Daniel Blake’, a harrowingly accurate portrayal of the current benefits system, and how it’s affecting the most vulnerable among us.
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