Oxfordshire All In make funding application to OCF
We have been invited to make a funding application to Oxfordshire Community Foundation’s Recover Stronger Fund.
We submitted our application yesterday afternoon (Thursday 25th June), and sought OCF’s permission to publish it publicly here too. You can find our covering letter and application form below.
Why publish publicly? Given that the stated purpose of our work is to be an effective infrastructure for community support and action - working with and on behalf of people, local communities, established voluntary organisations, and the public sector - it makes sense that these people and groups have this kind of information about us. We welcome challenges, constructive, and positive feedback to the ideas and plans contained - everything that will both hold to us account and ensure that - if our bid is successful - we are truly working for people and local communities as effectively as possible.
We encourage a diversity of opinion and a safe space to give feedback of any kind, so please do not be shy to engage with us, especially if you think we could be doing better - we want to hear from you! Not everything we are doing is contained in this application, and we hope you will find much more on our current activities and plans across our website too.
Due to the time constraints of our application and the large number of organisations we work with, we were unable to ask for their explicit permission to identify them in this public facing document and this information has been redacted. You can find out more about some of our partners here, and those within each strand of our work by contacting us. If there are elements of the work included that you would like to partner with us in achieving, please let us know!
Covering Letter
Application Form
Our plans to support and sustain Community Action
Early 2020 has been a reminder of the way in which people will pull together to help each other when it's really needed. But it has also seen inequalities widen as an effect of coronavirus. These inequalities won't go away as lockdown reduces, and we now need community action more than ever. If we are to sustain and support some of this new community activity, we need to act now!
We are now facilitating a coordinated offer of support, particularly to informal Community Support Groups unsure of their futures. The goal of this coordinated offer of support is to sustain - at town or district level and in coordination with existing local community organisations - a network of ‘Community Champions’, in a way not dissimilar to the excellent work of Oxford Hub in Oxford City. This network of Community Champions will connect with and complement existing community action in local areas, helping us to share best practices, connections, and a sense of shared purpose across the county.
We are calling all organisations who can offer concrete, practical support - particularly in the voluntary sector - to work with us. We can help you to make your offer known as widely as possible, and work together to ensure that community support remains joined up across the county in useful ways.
It is only together that we can properly support people and communities make their own decisions on how to continue, with all possible resources at their fingertips. Let's get to work!
To work with us to sustain community action in Oxfordshire, complete this short form.
Participation invited on OAI Diversity and Inclusion Board
We are inviting participation in a newly established independent Diversity and Inclusion Board to oversee the work of Oxfordshire All In, and ensure that it is as representative and inclusive as possible of marginalised and hard to reach groups. of practical action (stories board, bring it all together).
One initial task of the board will be to make recommendations that enable us to design better ways for marginalised groups to join in with our work, and the work of partnerships/forums and organisations.
Please let us know here if you have an interest in being a member of this board.
A better funding model for Oxfordshire's voluntary sector
Funding should be something that works better for people, communities, and the voluntary sector.
In particular, excellent and much needed work within the voluntary sector simply couldn’t happen without it.
What we believe about funding:
We need collectively to re-imagine the way that funding is commissioned and used, so that the whole process contains dialogue, shared goal setting, and a focus on outcomes rather than activities.
Individual community organisations need to have a shared, stronger voice in influencing trusts, foundations and individuals donors.
Leaders need to be able to focus more of their time working outside of a narrow organisational remit, and be able to proudly and confidently tell funders about the impact of this work.
Last but not least, we need more innovative forms of funding such as participatory grant making that put more money in the hands of local people and neighbourhood groups.
What do you believe? Tell us here!
Top 3 best practice: Partnerships and Forums
In May 2020 we reached out to organisations and bodies across Oxfordshire to ask them what they most valued in the partnerships and forums that they are a part of. Here is their ‘top 3’ of best practice for managing great partnerships and meetings so far:
Share genuine stories, and use this to build trust. People valued the opportunity to go deep sometimes, in sharing stories and using these to understand each other better. While this takes time, it’s well worth it in the long run if it means that you and your partners can work together with more mutual trust and understanding.
Finish meetings with clear actions for participants. It’s easy to have a great discussion, share valuable information, get excited about joint plans, and then leave without committing to the follow up actions that make it all worthwhile. The best partnerships ask organisations to be open and clear about what commitments they are taking away from meetings to act upon.
Think about how meetings connect back to the needs of people and communities. It’s easy to lose sight of this once the people at the heart of organisations work are one further step away. To remedy this, think about how organisations are bringing the views and feedback of their beneficiaries to meetings, and then taking back information about the outcomes. Openly publishing and disseminating information about meetings and forums is well worth the effort.
Find out more about partnerships in Oxfordshire here, and add partnerships you are a part of to the directory.
What next for the voluntary sector?
We believe that new shared action is needed within the Oxfordshire Voluntary Sector, to build the future that individuals and communities deserve.
We think that this should be based on what individuals, communities, and voluntary organisations across Oxfordshire have already told us they need. It should be action that is simple to understand, easy to join in with, and primarily about the practicalities of working better with people and communities.